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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/26668252">In Mind</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/daleyka/pseuds/daleyka'>daleyka</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Star Wars Sequel Trilogy</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Angst with a Happy Ending, Ben Solo Needs A Hug, Character Study, Complete, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Force Bond, Force Ghost Luke Skywalker, Force dreams, Growing Looks Good on You, Implied Relationships, Implied Torture, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Jedi/Sith - Freeform, Jedism, Kylo Ren Redemption, Morally Grey Ben Solo, Morally Grey Kylo Ren, No Sex, Not Canon Compliant, Redeemed Ben Solo, Redemption, Rey Needs A Hug, poetic-ish</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-09-26</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-09-27</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-06 12:27:25</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>5</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>29,899</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/26668252</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/daleyka/pseuds/daleyka</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Kylo Ren's haunted by what may or may not be Luke's ghost, and half suspects he's going insane. Rey's prowling his dreams, alone and afraid. He's the supreme leader. Everything's totally fine here, isn't it Ben?  </p><p>Story set immediately after The Last Jedi, and has nothing to do with the plot of The Rise of Skywalker, so is not canon-compliant. Soft, slow redemption arc.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>16</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>34</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. Chapter 1</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><ul class="associations">


        <li>
            Inspired by

            <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/14109462">Always With You</a> by <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/daleyka/pseuds/daleyka">daleyka</a>.
        </li>

    </ul><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>So, the story behind this is that I wrote another fic, Always With You, a few years ago, and it was – while not at all popular, and perhaps not even very good by any objective measures – something I kept coming back to and re-working. I just really liked it, but I felt that it wasn’t exactly what I wanted to achieve. It nagged at me. I had this very strong feeling that I had to finish it. </p><p>Over the last month or so, I began to re-write and edit that story and, eventually, I somehow turned it into this one. It’s the same fic in some ways, but its shape is different. It has more characters, in that Rey is involved. The original story will stay up, because I felt that if I deleted it, or replaced it with this one, that would somehow not be very honest, since they’re quite different. But if you read that one, then you have to appreciate that this one strongly overlaps. Some parts are identical. Many are not. </p><p>I hope you enjoy it, if you’re in the mood for the usual type of stuff I write: slow, talky, dreamy redemption. Lots of love and care to you all, wherever and whoever you are.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>‘Ben?’ a voice says suddenly, and he startles. Looks around, lightsaber raised. It sounded like the voice of Luke, but that cannot be so. Luke is dead.</p><p>‘Yeah, I’m here,’ the voice says again, although he doesn’t know who it’s talking to.  ‘Are you okay?’</p><p>This time, as he looks around, he makes out a vague silhouette against the metal of the door. It <em>looks </em>like Luke as well as sounds like him.</p><p>He blinks twice, hard, hoping it is a visual illusion. It isn’t. The silhouette, if anything, only gets sharper.</p><p>‘Ben?’ it repeats.</p><p>Then, as abruptly as it came, it disappears. He is alone in the room.<br/>
<br/>
</p><p>+</p><p><br/>
 He tries to sleep, and fails. This is normal for him. Every night is wakefulness punctuated by occasional sleep. Snatches of it. Sometimes, often, he gives up altogether and goes and trains, or walks around the base, or occasionally kills someone. Tonight, he’s chosen to do nothing so much as stare at the darkness and wait for sleep to come, if it does.</p><p>There’s a weird feeling in the room. Disorienting. A sheen, or shimmer, in the air. Something he can’t place. He keeps his saber with him always; he activates it now, watchful. The red glow reveals nothing. The normal walls. The window out onto the vast silence of the galaxy. He’s becoming paranoid.</p><p>‘What’s this about?’ a voice says, sounding distinctly annoyed, making him jump.<em> The</em> voice.</p><p>Ben doesn’t answer. He doesn’t want to encourage the hallucination. He’s learned a thing or two since he began with Snoke. One of them is that if a voice starts talking to you, and you can’t see to whom it belongs, the best thing to do is not to talk back to it.</p><p>‘Seriously,’ it says. ‘Where am I supposed to be? Where is this? It’s so dark.’</p><p>He turns over, faces the wall instead of the room.</p><p>He isn’t going to answer it, whatever the fuck it is. Some Jedi mind-trick, something residual memory from Ben Solo, drawn up by exhaustion and pain. It only sounds like Luke. It isn’t him really. It’s an illusion.  </p><p>‘Leia?’ the voice says, and it sounds afraid. ‘Where are you, Leia? Ben? Han?’</p><p>He doesn’t answer. None of those names belong to him.</p><p><br/>
+</p><p><br/>
He wakes up, if you could call it that, with a blinding headache. He’s slept a couple of hours at most. He can meditate some of it away, but the rest, well there’s nothing to be done about that. Another day is beginning.</p><p>That weird sheen, a sort of vague glow, is still there, in the corner. He identifies it immediately, staring at it glumly. Perhaps this is insanity? He’s often wondered if -</p><p>‘You sleep badly,’ the voice says, interrupting this thought. ‘Can’t say I’m surprised, given the things you’ve done.’<br/>
<br/>
<em>Go away</em>, he thinks. He isn’t going to talk to a disembodied voice that sounds like his dead uncle. Who would?</p><p>‘You were talking in your sleep,’ the voice goes on. ‘You sounded really unhappy.’</p><p>What the hell is this?</p><p>He gets up, absolutely determined to ignore it, and turns the shower on with vehemence. When he gets out, the room is mercifully silent, other than that vague fuzz of the Force at one its corners, some sort of light static signature that rests there. He doesn’t look directly at it.</p><p>When he goes to the meeting room, it’s still there. He doesn’t look directly at in that corner either.</p><p>+</p><p><br/>
Unfortunately, the static signature – hard to explain, as if there were a corner of every room he enters that is full of continual, low white noise that is easy to tune out but impossible to ever entirely ignore -  accompanies him everywhere he goes for the next fifteen hours, until he’s back in his own quarters and preparing to sleep.<br/>
<br/>
It hasn’t <em>talked</em>. It isn’t always in any obvious form. It’s just there – a watchful, odd energy. No one else notices it, and he certainly isn’t going to mention it to anyone. He just tries to blot it out, as best he can.</p><p>He’s fairly sure it’s some sad little throwback to the time he spent as a Padawan. He doesn’t know everything about Jedi death, especially not the way that Skywalker died. Maybe this always happens. They haunt the person they were nearest at time of death, or they haunt the person they perceive as their mortal enemy. Maybe it is insanity. Maybe it’s exhaustion. He has no idea. Doesn’t care.</p><p>The point is, it’s not a real thing. And even if it were, surely at some point the fucker will have to disappear back into the fabric of the universe anyway.</p><p><br/>
<br/>
+</p><p> </p><p><br/>
He goes to the training room and he kills the droids. Tortures them, smashes his saber through their bodies. Lets them fall, limp and struggling, and then forces them back into combat mode. Watches them fall again and again, as he hurts them. Mutilates them, cuts limbs, smashes eyes, noses. Does anything he can think of that is obscene and ugly. They’re only droids and they’re so crude as to be considered machines rather than entities, but it still feels good. It’s cleansing.</p><p>He needs the release of it. Things are stressful. The Resistance isn’t strong, but it’s persistent. It’s pervasive, like a weed spreading across the galaxy. Uproot it one place, and it appears in another. They fight with guerrilla tactics too, more and more. Beleaguered people have little choice other than that. They take out a First Order soldier or two; disrupt a mission for a day or more. Get people into hard terrain; confuse them. Petty stuff, but it’s draining to manage it. They’re splitting the First Order’s focus, and they’re doing it on purpose.</p><p>The way he copes is this. He murders droids. He goes out of his way to engage with the darkest, most pointlessly unpleasant impulses he has.</p><p>Today, it’s not got the same kick as usual. The activity’s still fun, but in the corner of the training room is still that fucking energy signature, the hellish hum of Jedi white. It’s not that it expresses any <em>judgement</em> per se of this way of killing the droids. It doesn’t do or express anything. It’s just there, floating, amorphous, vague. It can’t impact him.</p><p> It’s more that Ben knows that it can’t possibly approve, in his heart of hearts. He tells himself it’s not a ‘he’, but he’s heard his voice. He knows it might somehow, in some way, be Luke. His memory of Luke, or <em>a</em> memory of Luke. And while the idea of Luke watching him do this stuff doesn’t bother him because he thinks he should defer to Skywalker’s sensibilities, it still distracts him.</p><p>He sees himself as he knows his uncle would have seen it. A guy maiming a training droid. Spearing it through its eye. Torturing a robot. He must look stupid, must seem pathetic and out of control. He can hear Luke in his head sometimes. He can hear them all, going on and on. Why, what are you doing, this is pathetic, stop.  </p><p>He gives it up for today. Lets the droids fall to the ground and where he might once have prolonged it, lets them rest. They just lie dead, if you could call it that, and relatively unmutilated. Fighting them is too easy.</p><p>He looks at their stupid metallic faces. That <em>feeling </em>comes then, as he knew it would. It’s bad this time. It’s a gnawing kind of emptiness that appears in the absence of violence. It makes him want to scream. Or put his fist through something, which is exactly why he was here in the first place, to handle the urge. He thinks of contacting Rey. Reaching out. Can he taunt her?</p><p>He feels the sting of tears in his eyes, the frisson of tension in his body. He’s coiled, full of energy about to burst. He can’t contact Rey. He’s too fractured anyway. He’d never get a grip on the Force in this condition, not enough to connect with her.<br/>
<br/>
The stupid bastard thing still doesn’t do anything. It just floats there, benevolent or malevolent, he doesn’t know which. Perhaps nothing at all.</p><p> In his head, he curses it every way he can think, in every language he knows. In the fresher later, he slams his fist so hard against the tiles that it draws blood.</p><p> </p><p>+</p><p>Nights seem to be the worst. Once again, as he is lying down to sleep, he hears it. He’s nearly asleep, almost at the edge of it, trying very hard to let the unconsciousness wash over him and take him, when -</p><p>‘I don’t get it,’ the voice says.</p><p>For fuck’s sake.</p><p>‘Why am I here?’ it says again. ‘This really isn’t right…’</p><p>He still doesn’t answer.</p><p>‘I don’t want to be here.’</p><p><em>I don’t want you to be here either</em>, he thinks.</p><p>‘I know you can hear me, kid,’ the voice goes on. ‘You’re doing a lousy job of pretending to sleep. You’re doing a lousy job of pretending to be all right too. For what it’s worth.’</p><p>He still doesn’t say anything back. He just <em>refuses</em>.</p><p>The voice sighs. Ben turn his back to it and manages, eventually, to get to something that qualifies as sleep.</p><p><br/>
+</p><p>He dreams about Rey sometimes. He isn’t sure if she’s dreaming about him at the same time, or if they are in any sense really together in these experiences, but it certainly feels that way. There’s an air of reality to it that suggests it’s through the Force that he dreams about her.</p><p>She’s angry, just as she’d been when he saw her last. Frustrated, tired. He can sense her and the edges of her exhaustion and doubt are sharp and painful.</p><p>‘Not now,’ she says, on seeing him, which lends credence to the idea that it’s not a dream. Her arms are crossed. ‘Really not now.’</p><p>‘Why not?’</p><p>‘I’m asleep.’ She thinks about this. ‘Or I think I am. Aren’t you?’</p><p>‘Something like that.’ He pauses. ‘Rey, I can sense you. You’re unhappy. I could help you. Bring you to your true purpose.’</p><p>‘No.’</p><p>In these dreams, there are no sabers. He’s fairly sure if there were, hers would be drawn right now.</p><p>‘You should consider it. The Resistance can offer you nothing.’</p><p>‘Go the fuck away,’ she says, and her voice is very cold. ‘Stop this, Ben. It’s not what I want. Can’t you see that? Can’t you sense it?’</p><p>Of course he can sense it. It’s always been obvious that who and what she is does not fit with the things he’s offering. That only strengthens his resolve to offer them.</p><p>‘Stop killing my friends,’ she tells him, even more resolute. ‘Stop being Kylo Ren. Stop living like this.’</p><p>He shakes his head, annoyed, even angry. She blazes so bright, even in his dreams. He can feel the light around her, compelling and dangerous. It calls to him.</p><p>A step towards her. Another. They’re close now. He could reach out to touch her. To bring his hands to her face. To her mouth. To her neck. What he notices is that she never backs away, not even when he’s as near as this. She just looks at him, staring. Breathing hard.</p><p>‘No,’ he says, and she still doesn’t back away from him.</p><p>When he wakes up, he doesn’t bother to ask himself whether it really happened.</p><p>+</p><p> </p><p>The next day, he trains. He trains alone, invariably. There used to be people he trained with, but they have all either died or declined to train with him any further, so that’s that. The knights could train with him, but they can’t use the Force so they waste his time. He needs a skilled Jedi or Sith to play with, which would be either Rey, or his own mother. Neither seems like much of an option right now.</p><p>Routine, rote tedium. That is what this is. He moves in synch with the training droid, his feet floating slightly off the ground. He can apprehend its movements, of course. He’s just marking time like this. The stupid thing hasn’t got infinite settings and abilities. It’s a state-of-the-art training model, but he’s a Jedi – or he was, anyway. It’d take more than state-of-the-art to provide a challenge for him.</p><p>The energy is there watching, of course. It’s more formed now. It has an outline of a human being, just sometimes, from the corner of his eye. In certain lights, he can almost make out its hair. He tries to dismiss it, as much as he can.</p><p>He doesn’t think he’s insane. It’s been a few days now, and other than seeing it, nothing else seems to be different about him. He hopes it’s a kind of temporary space sickness, like the hallucinatory condition they had recently on that planet near Jakar, the one that made all the locals see strange shooting stars that never existed…</p><p>On the other hand, that hallucinatory condition came with a side effect of vomiting up blood, which he absolutely isn’t doing. It was a treatable, medical condition experienced by multiple people. Ben’s not going to ask, but he’s fairly sure no one else is seeing the thing that isn’t Luke. So -</p><p>Fuck it, whatever. He moves his lightsaber towards the training droid, poised to strike. He’ll take it down in three moves.</p><p>‘Your left foot is completely off again,’ the voice says, sharply, making him jump. ‘That’s just sloppy.’</p><p>‘What?’ Ben says, too surprised and irritated not to reply to the voice that he is absolutely choosing to believe is only in his head. He doesn’t turn back to look at it. He focuses forward on the droid.</p><p>‘Your left foot,’ the voice says, and this time he does turn round. He can make out a slightly sharper silhouette, that of a man slouched by the far wall. ‘What on earth are you doing?’</p><p>He looks down at his left foot, and is embarrassed to notice that the voice – perhaps his subconscious? –  was right. He is not in the right stance. He corrects it. Returns to focus and, not wanting to waste any time, slices the droid’s head off. They always fix it in engineering later. The model’s designed to withstand violence, which is just as well.</p><p>Its body falls with a metallic series of clunks. Ben ignores it, and turns back to his – the voice. The man.</p><p>‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘You think you’d have got away with that in my Temple, or what? Who’s supposed to be training you here?’</p><p>Ben rubs his eyes.</p><p>‘I don’t need a teacher.’</p><p> ‘Yes you do,’ Luke says, and then he steps forward out of the shadow.</p><p>He isn’t substantial. He is definitely dead, something incorporeal. Ben can’t see through him, not as such, but there’s a quality to his form that isn’t human.  His shape is nevertheless that of Luke. His voice is Luke’s. His face.</p><p>‘You’re really out of practice,’ Luke says. His face is hard to read. It’s not clear if he’s smiling or scowling.</p><p>Ben doesn’t even bother running him through with his lightsaber this time. Clearly he isn’t <em>really here</em>. This is some stupid Force distraction again.</p><p>‘This is only wasting your time,’ he says.</p><p>He squares up to it. Makes direct eye contact, if you could call it that with a ghost, a shadow.</p><p> ‘This is a trick, and it’s pathetic. You’re dead. I killed you.’</p><p>‘Well…’ Luke demurs slightly, and there is almost a sardonic expression on his face. Where his face would be, if it were solid. ‘I thought I was. But apparently here I am, doomed to watch you make embarrassing training mistakes for all eternity. And you didn’t kill me, by the way.’</p><p>Ben <em>hates</em> him. The rage he feels is sudden and violent.</p><p>‘I don’t make mistakes,’ he says.</p><p>‘Beg to differ.’</p><p>Luke, the thing that may be Luke, steps forward again, so he’s almost in the centre of the room.</p><p>‘Watch,’ he says.</p><p>Then he mimes exactly what Ben has just done, the way he advanced, the way he cut the saber against the droid’s neck. The way he steps back from it.</p><p>Okay, it does look a bit clumsy when he does it – but he’s a <em>ghost</em>. He’s a figment of someone’s imagination. Of course he’s clumsy.</p><p>‘I didn’t do it like that,’ he says.</p><p>‘Yes, you did.’ Luke resumes slouching against his wall. ‘It really was embarrassing. For you and for me.’</p><p>It seems pointless to argue, to have any sort of debate with this … <em>thing</em>. On the other hand, if he’s going insane and talking to himself, he’s already started now. He might as well at least win the argument. He makes his voice as sardonic and cold as possible.</p><p>‘What exactly should I have done differently?’</p><p>Now he’s quite sure that Luke is grinning. ‘Finally, you ask.’</p><p>‘Well?’</p><p>‘Where to start. For one thing, since when did you think it was a good idea to hold your lightsaber like that?’</p><p>‘Like what?’</p><p>‘Like you’re an amateur part time Force user. Come on, Ben. Where do you put your upper two fingers?’</p><p>This is <em>really</em> old stuff.</p><p>‘I was holding it correctly. And my name’s Kylo Ren.’</p><p>‘No you absolutely weren’t,’ Luke says. ‘And no it absolutely isn’t. I don’t know what’s wrong with you. You’d think that now you’re what, the Supreme Leader, you’d know how to hold a lightsaber properly.’</p><p>‘I <em>do</em>.’</p><p>‘Show me then. It’s not like I can go anywhere better.’</p><p>‘Why the fuck not. I don’t want you here.’</p><p>‘Yeah, you and me both… I’ve tried to leave a million times. I just keep coming back here. Back to wherever you are.’</p><p>‘Why? Who’s doing this?’</p><p>Luke sighs. ‘I don’t know, Ben. Not me, that’s for sure. I’m not working with the Resistance. I’m dead. I can’t even touch anything, much less reach out to anyone.’</p><p>‘I don’t want you here,’ he says again. ‘I don’t want you anywhere. I’m glad you’re dead.’</p><p>‘Great,’ Luke says. ‘So go on, run me through with your lightsaber. The one you don’t even know how to hold right.’</p><p>‘Fine,’ Ben says, and he does actually raise his lightsaber, facing towards his uncle. He subtly checks his fingers, and they are definitely in the right position.</p><p>‘Made you look,’ Luke says, and he grins.</p><p>Ben does run him through with the saber then. He charges him, and cuts right through the ghostly, insubstantial son of a bitch.</p><p>Unfortunately, it has no effect at all.</p><p> ‘This again?’ Luke says. ‘How many times are you going to do this before you realise it doesn’t work?’</p><p>At which point, Ben chooses to resume ignoring him. Eventually, he fades back into the vague energy form that suits him best; but he’s still there, just no longer visibly, evidently, a human being at all. This is how it has to be. Ben ignoring him; Luke, if that is what he is, floating incorporeally around in silence. This is the best and only viable situation.</p><p><br/>
+</p><p> </p><p>The problem is, it’s actually quite hard to ignore the ghostly presence of your uncle, if he’s there every single minute of the day.</p><p>Ben does his best with it over the next few days. He continues his work as Supreme Leader, he tries to keep the mutinies down, keeps the battles running smoothly. He refuses to make <em>contact</em> with the bastard thing, but it is still there. It doesn’t seem to be able to go more than a few metres away from him. It talks to him, and sometimes he answers but generally not.</p><p>Mercifully, it doesn’t follow him to the ‘fresher at least. At nights, it hovers, lethargic, in the dark at the opposite end of the room. During the days, it floats around, disconsolate.</p><p>He never mentions it to anyone. He trusts no one and has no friends, not of that kind anyway; not the kind he would speak to about something personal such as his potential insanity. Something which, a few days later, it, <em>the voice</em>, goes as far as to point out.</p><p>He mostly talks at night, when Ben is lying there in the dark, trying to unwind his thoughts, slow down his mind, manage pain, get away from the commands and orders and training and focus, just briefly. Trying to get some fucking sleep, if he only he could.</p><p> ‘You’re really lonely here,’ the voice says, thoughtfully, while Ben lies there, trying to meditate on sleep, to just get his mind to let go enough to at least give him an hour’s rest.</p><p>He answers this time.</p><p>‘Loneliness is a meaningless idea. Everyone is alone.’</p><p>‘Okay,’ Luke says. ‘Sure. But there’s that sort of alone and then there’s this. Are you really <em>happy</em>, Ben?’</p><p>‘What do you care?’</p><p>‘You think I don’t care?’</p><p> ‘I think Ben Solo is dead, and you miss him. You care about him, and you’re a fool, because he was a weak, stupid child.’</p><p>‘Yeah,’ Luke says. ‘Probably he was. But he was mine to take care of, and I failed him. Pretty badly. And now I see you here like this, and I can’t help thinking I’m failing him for a second time.’</p><p>He pauses. ‘Don’t run me through with another lightsaber, kid. Don’t go crazy. It’s not going to do a damn thing to get rid of me, and we both know that.’</p><p>Ben doesn’t bother to answer.</p><p>‘You know I can’t leave,’ Luke says. ‘I can’t even talk to anyone who isn’t you. I’ve tried, but they don’t hear me. It’s not like this situation is working out well for me either.’</p><p>‘Can’t you just connect to the Force?’ Ben says, irritably. ‘Surely if you’re dead, you can just… let go? Disappear? Fade into molecules?’</p><p>‘Tried it, doesn’t work. I just come back, right here. Right where you are.’</p><p>‘Well, I don’t want you here.’</p><p>‘I got that much. You said that before.’</p><p>‘And stop talking to me at nights. I’m trying to sleep.’</p><p>Luke sighs audibly. ‘It’s easier at night. That’s why I do it. At nights I can see you much clearer.’</p><p>‘So try to un-see me.’</p><p>‘I can’t do that. Believe me, I would if I could. I really don’t want to look at you like this.’</p><p>‘Like what?’</p><p>‘So very unhappy.’</p><p>Ben has the retort that he isn’t at all unhappy on the tip of tongue, but somehow, he doesn’t quite manage to voice it. It’s better to just not engage with this nightmare.</p><p><br/>
+</p><p> </p><p>‘For god’s sake,’ Luke says, emerging again during a particularly difficult training session the following morning. ‘I know you didn’t sleep, but…’</p><p>‘Go away.’</p><p>‘Great retort. Sith training’s given you a lot in the way of verbal wit.’</p><p>‘I’m not a Sith,’ he hisses. He knows he shouldn’t rise to it, shouldn’t even talk to him. Sometimes though, it’s too annoying not to respond. Besides, he’s totally alone in the training room, sealed behind a locked door. No one is going to hear him talking to himself.</p><p>‘Right,’ Luke says. ‘You’re not. Just a Force user who kills people. You just recreationally choke people. You head up an evil army. You’re not a Sith.’</p><p>‘Evil’s a relative concept,’ Ben says. He moves the saber swiftly through the air, ignoring the discomfort he sometimes feels doing this move. He doesn’t care. Fuck but he doesn’t. ‘I don’t see this as evil.’</p><p>‘No?’ Luke says. His tone is very flat.</p><p>‘No.’</p><p>His uncle’s form during the daylight – when he emerges into one - is always so light, barely present. Not transparent, but something more like looking through a glass of water. A visible shape of a person, but not more than that. He’s slouching against the wall, watching Ben as he trains.</p><p>‘Anyway. What do you <em>want</em>?’ Ben snaps at him irritable. He’s really trying to get something here, a difficult Force move.</p><p>‘For my student to remember a single thing I taught him?’</p><p>‘I’m <em>not</em> your student.’</p><p>‘Ex-student, then. My ex-student non-Sith non-nephew.’</p><p>Ben runs him through with his lightsaber, out of sheer perversity. He knows it can’t hurt him. It’s just that it’s satisfying to do it anyway. Luke’s form only fades, briefly, before returning to its usual solidity.</p><p>Ben goes back to training, ignoring him altogether.</p><p>‘I seriously can’t take this,’ Luke says, after a few minutes have elapsed. ‘At least let me help you to train. Even if you are a Sith, it’s got to be better than just watching you make the same mistakes again and again.’</p><p>‘I don’t need anything from you.’</p><p>‘Oh, Ben.’ His uncle’s face manages, somehow, to show disappointment. He knows that look perfectly well. ‘You don’t even see the things you’re doing wrong.’</p><p>He puts down his saber and turns to face Luke full on. He feels that swell of anger again, rising up, uncontrollable.</p><p>‘I am not doing <em>anything wrong</em>.’</p><p>‘You’ve totally forgotten how to open the form properly,’ Luke says. ‘What even was that beginning? And when you push with the Force, you’re not balanced.’</p><p>This is enough to snap him.</p><p>‘I don’t understand what you expect,’ he says, angry, even raging. ‘I’m not a Jedi. I don’t want to be one. I don’t want the Jedi order to exist. I’ve killed as many Jedi as I could find. Why would I want to remember how to open a form? I wasted enough years of my life with that.’</p><p>‘Because you’re doing them anyway,’ Luke says, his tone careful. ‘I’m having to watch you train here. Half of what you’re doing is stuff I taught you, but you’re messing a lot of it up. I’m not sure if it’s deliberate or if you’ve just forgotten.’</p><p>‘I disagree with your interpretation.’</p><p>The heat he feels is positively vibrating through him. Nearby, a couple of shelves vibrate ominously. He wonders if he might be about to go into meltdown.</p><p>‘Don’t get so angry,’ Luke says, his tone gently chiding as if Ben is still his little nephew. ‘I’m just saying that you might want a hand with a few things. If you don’t have a teacher, you forget things.’</p><p>‘You have nothing that interests me. The Jedi were nothing. I regret the time I wasted with them.’</p><p>‘Right,’ Luke says. Ben has the distinct impression that his uncle has been holding in his patience, and then suddenly, all at once, he seems to let it go.</p><p>‘You know what, kid?’ he says, and there is a flash of anger, a ripple in the Force that Ben can almost feel – his uncle’s signature stronger than it has ever been. ‘You should be interested. Because the way you’re working right now, the mistakes you’re making, someone is going to slit your throat one of these days.</p><p>‘You left it wide open more than once for an attack. No one is training you here. The way it looks to me, no one’s trained you for years, other than to do some of those nasty little tricks you like so much. You are going to <em>die</em> because of not being interested in what I have to say, and I’ll… ‘ Luke gathers his breath, or so it seems. ‘I’ll see you in hell when they do.’</p><p>Then, mercifully, his form does appear to slightly fade out somewhat, into a low hum of energy. Ben continues his training, and although it’s quiet, although he does what he wants, he can’t quite shake the feeling that he is missing something after all.</p><p> </p><p>+</p><p>That night, Luke says nothing. His energy is there, solid and calm in the corner of the room. Ben can feel that he’s there, but he’s not choosing to speak tonight.</p><p>Fine, he thinks. <em>Great.</em></p><p>He manages to sleep almost soundly, give or take the odd nightmare that leaves him frantically gasping for air. Give or time the odd sick feeling of despair, of guilt.  The usual things.</p><p> </p><p>+</p><p> </p><p>He makes a mistake in training. It’s a small thing, really. He’s thinking hard about strategy as he works through a routine. Hux has organised a meeting and Ben feels – well, he feels that he’d like to kill everyone in the meeting. To torture and maim them. This is not politic, but it is what he would like. The thoughts swirl in his mind, and as he thinks them, the darkness of it feels threatening. He pulls it back, at least a bit. He’s not Light, but he’s got the sense to know when dark is dragging him down into a pit he won’t get out of so –</p><p>As he thinks about it, several things happen at once. The first is that reflecting on light, even in the most trivial and selfish of ways, makes Luke suddenly appear much more vivid. The second is that, as he stares at this sudden and horrifying vision of his resurrected uncle, the droid he’s fighting takes its opportunity and stabs him hard in the shoulder, striking down very, very fast. He’s set them on kill mode.</p><p>Violent pain, sharp and red. Blood. He can feel his shoulder bleeding out. The droid’s about to strike again, this time harder and worse.</p><p>‘Ben!’ Luke’s voice says, and he sounds genuinely worried, which is bizarre, and even more destabilising. Fuck, the blood is coming fast.</p><p>‘Decapitate!’ Luke says, urgently. Ben listens, the pain hardening his senses to a single point: his uncle’s voice. He does it, using his other arm. Neat cut, the head slices off. He’s still bleeding. He feels dizzy.</p><p>Luke’s there, but now’s really not the time. He closes his eyes, drawing the Force around him. He can sense the injury. It’s bad, but not necessarily fatal. He can control it. The pain is only a thought; an idea about pain. He breathes through it, like the other ideas about pain he has. The Force can hold an injury in stasis, if you know how to use it right.</p><p>He grits his teeth. Opens his eyes.</p><p>‘Medbay?’ Luke says, sounding bewildered. ‘Now, maybe?’</p><p>Ben shakes his head.</p><p>‘No medbay,’ he manages, through the same gritted teeth. ‘Quarters.’</p><p>All the way back, he trails blood down the corridor, a thick red skein behind him. Luke follows, and Ben doesn’t even need to look at him to know that what’s on his face is confusion and doubt.</p><p> </p><p>+</p><p>That night, as he lies in bed, trying to sleep, his shoulder is so fucked up that it hurts to move it. He’s performed basic healing on it, with the medpack he has here in his quarters. He can do simple, regular stuff. It’s no longer bleeding, and it’s not going to become infected. With the Force, he doesn’t have to feel pain.</p><p>Hovering, of course, is Luke’s shadowy presence. His expression is unreadable in the dark, but Ben can see it anyway.  </p><p>What the hell is he still doing here? Why is he here?</p><p>‘For fuck’s sake,’ Ben says, in his uncle’s general direction.</p><p>‘Are you talking to me?’ His uncle’s voice, surprised, comes across stronger than it ever has. It is so unmistakably him. ‘You’ve never spoken to me first.’</p><p>‘You weren’t saying anything.’</p><p>‘I thought you didn’t want me to.’</p><p>‘I don’t’ Ben says, irritably. ‘But I don’t want you to just sit there either. I can see you’re there.’</p><p>‘I was trying to split my form again,’ Luke says. ‘Get out of this damn place. I just can’t do it. I don’t understand it.’</p><p>‘I don’t either.’</p><p>‘How’s your shoulder?’ Luke says, quietly.</p><p> ‘Fine. The med-drones can fix it properly tomorrow. I just needed to perform simple healing.’</p><p>‘Really?’ Luke says. ‘Because it looked like quite a deep hit you took there. Quite a lot of blood, too.’</p><p>‘I can handle it.’</p><p> ‘Yeah, I know that.’ Luke’s voice is more normal now, close to what it was when he lived. It has tone and colour. It’s definitely not ethereal. ‘Still, kid. Watch what you’re doing.’</p><p> ‘Don’t call me that.’</p><p>‘Why not?’ Luke says, sounding sad. ‘I can’t see you as anything else.’<br/>
<br/>
</p><p>+</p><p> </p><p>An hour later, as Ben lies there, still wide awake, shoulder still crippled with pain, thoughts racing, he manages to turn towards Luke, whose outline is still there, faint and steady.</p><p>He has no chance of sleeping. It hurts too much, even with meditation to suppress the pain, and he’s too wired from the day. He’s uncomfortably aware that he’s still bleeding a bit too, leaving a stickiness on the sheet that feels unpleasant if he moves his position.</p><p>He doesn’t want to go to the medbay until the morning. He has to keep up appearances of a lack of ability to feel pain, to make it all seem like a tedious formality of healing. It’s something he’s known for – his ability to supress pain. It’s part of the Kylo Ren mystique, which he needs to run this bastard operation.</p><p>Fuck it.</p><p>‘Luke?’ he whispers. It is the first time he has said the other man’s name out loud.</p><p>‘What is it?’</p><p>‘Did you see what I did wrong, when I was fighting earlier? When the droid…’</p><p>‘Sure.’ His uncle’s voice is very calm, and far too kind. It reminds Ben, bizarrely, of being much younger. ‘What do you think you did wrong?’</p><p>‘Lost focus.’</p><p>‘Right,’ Luke says. ‘You weren’t psychologically present in that fight. I don’t know where you were or what you were thinking about. I thought I could sense something but –‘</p><p>‘I was reflecting on the Light,’ Ben says, truthfully although he puts a sneer in his voice. ‘See where that got me.’</p><p>‘You do that a lot? Reflecting on the light?’</p><p>‘Not much.’</p><p>‘Maybe that’s the problem,’ Luke says, and his voice is very softly sardonic, but it’s still kind. ‘I’m not sure you can blame the Jedi for the fact you let a training droid slash your shoulder to pieces when you were unexpectedly revisiting your heritage, you know.’ He pauses. ‘And anyway, it wasn’t just that. You always had that problem with your left side swing, ever since you were younger. Remember?’</p><p>‘I thought I fixed it.’</p><p>‘You land heavy on your right,’ Luke says. ‘And look, I’m getting pretty sick of being run through with a lightsaber, I don’t want you to charge me like a bull seeing a red rag but… sometimes you’re really lazy. You train with droids. You don’t have to think the same as you would if you had human opponents. I don’t think it helps you.’</p><p>Ben doesn’t say anything at all to that. He’s tired, and in pain. He doesn’t have the energy to fight this as well.</p><p>‘Just let me train with you, Ben,’ Luke continues. He sounds so very calm. ‘I really do think I can help you. I’m not asking you to be a Jedi, or even to be a good person. I know you’ll use what I teach you for your own things, and I might not agree with those things. But at least let me help you.’</p><p>He takes another breath, and Ben has the distinct impression that his uncle is calming himself down even further, preparing what to say.</p><p>‘You may disagree,’ he says, ‘but I do know you as a fighter. I don’t know what any of this is, but I do know that I don’t want to watch you throw away all your training and skill to the point where you get stabbed by training droids because your mind’s wandering. That’d be an ignominious end for you.’</p><p>‘That won’t happen.’</p><p>‘It might,’ Luke says, rather dryly. ‘If today’s anything to go by. What the fuck were you thinking? What kind of time was that to start reflecting on the light? In the middle of a battle in which you’re dependent on darkness to function? Are you kidding me?’</p><p>‘It’s more complex than that.’</p><p>‘Yeah, I’m sure it is. But I’d say especially if you’re planning to do that regularly, you might want some advice from me.’</p><p>‘I’m not interested.’</p><p>‘You could be interested,’ Luke says, sounding speculative. ‘At least try it for one training session, Ben. You’re alone, so why not? If you hate it, or it’s useless, just run me through with a saber again. You apparently enjoy that a lot.’</p><p>‘Fine,’ Ben says, more to get him to shut up than anything else. ‘You can offer me some brief practical advice tomorrow, if you think you have anything useful to say.’</p><p>He pauses. ‘Also my name’s Kylo Ren.’</p><p>‘Not to me,’ Luke says. ‘I can’t call you a made up name. Also, you’ll sleep better if you put a pillow under your shoulder. You should at least keep it in place if you refuse to fix it.’</p><p> </p><p>+</p><p>It doesn’t surprise him at all that in the brief sleep he has, he dreams of her. She seems to be closer when he’s distressed. Pain, discomfort, doubt. It all brings her closer, as if she can sense it in him somehow. This has happened before, that he’s dreamed of her when he’s been injured or particularly susceptible to the light.</p><p>She’s walking somewhere he doesn’t recognise. A sort of garden, with a long stone walkway, edged with strange flowers, vivid blue and red. The area around them is a desert. Cracked, dried land. Desiccated, apart from those flowers.</p><p>‘Where’s this?’ he asks her, and she starts. Turns to look at him.</p><p>‘Ben…’ she says, warningly, almost darkly. ‘This is my dream.’</p><p>He’s in pain even in the dream. His shoulder’s bleeding onto the pillow. He can feel the slippery clamminess of the blood he’s lying in, even though he’s not awake. Instinctively, he touches his shoulder, although of course in the dream there’s no injury.</p><p>Rey watches this, curious and silent.</p><p>‘Shoulder,’ he tells her, although he doesn’t know why. ‘It’s bleeding in real life.’</p><p>She raises her eyebrows. ‘I see.’</p><p>‘I don’t try to come into your dreams, you know,’ he says. ‘It just happens that way.’</p><p>Her posture relaxes, just a fraction. ‘I know that. I understand it’s not because you’re desperate to see Jakku. But I still wish you’d stop.’</p><p>‘I’ve already been to Jakku.’</p><p>‘Not this part.’ She indicates around her. ‘This part was for the rich people. The two or three of them who existed lived here.’</p><p>He doesn’t make small-talk and has no idea how to go about it. He just looks. It seems like what it is: a few flowers in a wasteland. A marginal improvement on a slum. He’d raise the whole planet to the ground in a heartbeat.</p><p>‘What happened to your shoulder, anyway?’ she asks, seeing that he’s not going to reply.</p><p>‘Nothing worth mentioning.’</p><p>‘I don’t even know why I come here. I don’t know why I’m talking to you about it.’</p><p>She’s already fading away from him, out of the dream. <em>Don’t go</em>, he wants to say, but doesn’t. <em>Don’t go.</em></p><p>+</p><p>In the morning, he goes to the medclinic to have his shoulder healed, and although it hurts, his face remains impassive. His uncle watches, quiet, vaguely present. Healed is a relative term. It’s not actually a particularly good med centre. The droids work well enough, but auto-healing has its limits.</p><p>Still, they patch up breaks. He flexes it and it feels more or less fine. And then, of course, he goes to the training room where he always works, every morning, and he begins the things he always does.</p><p>He expects Luke to stop him, to insist that he follows his orders, but he doesn’t. He only watches and waits, and when Ben’s done, only then does he step out, his form slightly more corporeal than usual. The expression on his face, where his face would be, is calm.</p><p>‘Fine,’ he says. ‘But your shoulder’s sore. Unsurprisingly. You’re avoiding stretching it.’</p><p>‘I don’t think so. I don’t feel pain.’</p><p>‘You’re a human being. You feel pain,’ Luke says, but his voice is oddly indifferent. He is just stating a fact. ‘But even if you don’t, your shoulder’s stopping you from moving well. You’re not leading in right at all.’</p><p>Ben tenses up, angered by this.</p><p>‘Watch,’ Luke says, and he moves himself, barely visible. Ben can still see the problem. Almost unconsciously, he adjusts into the right stance, the one that Luke isn’t doing but should be.</p><p>‘Great,’ Luke says. ‘You remember. Can you swing left?’</p><p>He does, and it’s been quite a while since he’s done that, and it’s not particularly natural. It really hurts his shoulder too. It puts pressure on the wrong place, to the point that he almost makes a noise of distress. At least Luke doesn’t make an issue of it, although he must know that Ben feels it.</p><p>‘Okay,’ he says. ‘You’re not doing that as well as you should be. You know that. Do you remember the yestdra?’</p><p> ‘A Jedi foolishness. Pointless.’</p><p>‘Well,’ Luke says. ‘Sure, from your perspective. But if you just think about it as a strengthening exercise for your shoulder, don’t you think it might help?’</p><p>‘Possibly.’</p><p>‘So…’</p><p>He does it. He has a fairly good memory of this form, how it flows and shapes. Doing it takes him back to being fourteen, fifteen. Some happier time, when he took all this for granted, when it did it every day, and so often, when he was in such great Jedi shape. All of this came so easy, once upon a time.</p><p>It feels good, in a strange way, to perform it again.</p><p>‘Fine,’ Luke says, after he’s finished. ‘Although I’m not totally sure about why you’re moving your right arm like that. Is that what I taught you?’</p><p>‘No,’ he admits, thinking about it.</p><p>‘Can you redo it? It’s a small thing, but your shoulder’s really tight. You need to get it right.’</p><p>Ben sighs.</p><p>He does the form a few more times, correctly this time, and irritatingly enough, he can feel his shoulder clicking slightly into place. It hurts slightly less than usual.</p><p> Luke, watching this, seems somewhat satisfied.</p><p>‘That problem predates the droid wound,’ he says, stating a fact again. ‘What happened to that shoulder before?’</p><p>‘Broke a couple of years back,’ Ben says, without elaborating.</p><p>‘In a fight? Or …’</p><p>‘I fell.’</p><p>There’s a pause, as Luke seems to process this, not quite understanding.</p><p>‘But you don’t fall,’ he says. ‘The Force always carries you. Since when have you ever fallen?’</p><p>Ben doesn’t answer that. There’s nothing to say.</p><p> </p><p>+</p><p> </p><p>That aside, the first training session’s not as bad as it could have been.</p><p>At least Luke is helpful. He isn’t difficult.</p><p> He doesn’t make any sardonic cracks about the Dark Side, doesn’t try to appear to Ben’s immortal soul or anything like that, running through some weepy story about forgiveness and love and family et cetera. He never mentions Leia, the Resistance, Han, or any of it. Doesn’t teach anything objectionably Jedi.</p><p>He just calmly corrects his posture, pointing out things Ben’s forgotten from training so long ago, watching and evaluating.</p><p>They don’t talk much at all, really. It’s all, ‘move to the left’ and ‘switch position’ and ‘if you put your weight on the back foot, you’ll never –‘</p><p>It’s actually quite weird, being trained again by Luke. He’s used to it, he can say that much, although he didn’t <em>remember</em> that he was used to it. Plus the more Luke mentions, the more Ben realises he <em>is</em> a bit out of form. Not that he’s not strong, not capable. He just hasn’t trained any of this stuff for a long time.</p><p> He isn’t sure it has any point, but at least it’s different.</p><p> </p><p>+</p><p>‘Was it useful?’ Luke says, as they finish the session.</p><p>Ben is tired, much more so than he usually would be after training. He feels slightly drained by it, by having been so relentlessly conditioned, tested, and pushed.</p><p>‘Moderately,’ he says. </p><p>‘I think we should carry on,’ Luke says, neutrally. ‘You’re tired, after a three-hour training session. That isn’t normal. It shouldn’t be normal, for a person who’s training every day, who’s at peak physical strength. You have quite a lot of problems I can fix.’</p><p>‘I’m not tired.’</p><p> ‘You’re slouching. You look tired to me.’</p><p> ‘I just haven’t done those things in a long time.’</p><p> ‘Sure,’ Luke says. ‘I saw that.’</p><p> He offers no further comment, no judgement on it.</p><p> ‘Fine then,’ Ben says, making a snap decision on the point. ‘Since you’re there in the room anyway. But I don’t want to hear anything about the Jedi or Sith or temple. That world is dead to me.’</p><p>‘Yeah,’ Luke says and if he’s annoyed by this comment, it doesn’t show. ‘Okay. As you like.’</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. Chapter 2</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>‘I don’t know that one,’ Luke says at one point, as Ben throws his lightsaber, hard, into the face of one of the training droids so it cuts straight through his eye. ‘Not sure about the eye thing.’</p><p>‘It’s efficient,’ he says, coolly.</p><p>‘Well, sure. It’s incapacitating. Except then your saber’s at the other side of the room. And you have … eye stuff all over it.’</p><p>He knows Luke finds this sort of thing distasteful.</p><p>‘It doesn’t stain. It wouldn’t with a person either.’</p><p>‘Uff,’ Luke says.</p><p>But then, the expected comment about the Dark Side never comes, no tearful plea to return to the Light, none of that. Whatever he is thinking, he keeps it to himself.</p><p> ‘I can pull it back with the Force.’</p><p>Which he does so, the saber flying back into his hand easily.</p><p>‘Great,’ Luke says. ‘Glad to know you’re using the Force for boomerang tricks. Useful. But what if you can’t do that? I don’t think it’s wise to throw your weapon. It’s very showy, very … ‘ He gestures around the room. ‘Very all this. But wouldn’t it be better to keep hold of your weapon? You know, the one that’s <em>sacred</em>. The one that is uniquely connected to you, the conduit of your power.’</p><p>He irritates Ben tremendously.</p><p>‘Snoke considered it a useful possibility.’</p><p>‘Somewhat ironic he got run through with a saber he wasn’t watching, then,’ Luke says. ‘It’s better to know where they are. To keep them in hand.’</p><p>Ben ignore that.</p><p>‘What did you mean, anyway. <em>Very all this</em> what?’</p><p>‘Very Supreme Leader. Throwing a sword through someone’s eye.’</p><p>‘I <em>am</em> the Supreme Leader.’</p><p>‘Yeah. Don’t I know it.’</p><p>‘You can’t stop me.’</p><p>‘Probably not,’ Luke says, calmly. ‘I’m dead and I can’t talk to anyone but you. I can’t do a thing. Watch on your right there -’</p><p>He watches on his right.<br/><br/></p><p>+</p><p> </p><p>Some days later, the training has started to become almost normal. He adapts to Luke. It’s not that much of a stretch to include him in the training routine, as long as he keeps away from all mention of Jedi-related matters, which he does. He’s just a sort of fitness coach who happens to be his dead uncle. You could see it that way, mostly.</p><p>Luke shows him various things. He can’t use the Force himself, not as such, but he can direct Ben’s attention well enough to what he should be doing. It’s fine that way. It takes the threat out of the situation that Luke doesn’t have any power.</p><p>At some point, Ben raises lightning, which he didn’t used to be able to do at Temple, or not very well since it’s something you can only really do when you’re angry and out of control. He feels angry all the time now. It gives him access to power, to feel this way. Buzzing, low-level rage. Irritation. He thrives on it.</p><p>He lets the lightning spark in his hand before throwing it, hard, at one of the droids. It sizzles to a jarred husk of metal and plastic.</p><p>‘Mm,’ Luke says, watching this. ‘That’s new.’</p><p>‘Snoke taught me to control it.’</p><p>‘Doesn’t look controlled.’</p><p>‘What?’</p><p>‘Your throw was off,’ Luke says. He’s using that neutral, evaluative voice again. ‘It should have hit square, but it actually grazed the shoulder.’</p><p>‘Lethal hit,’ Ben points out, looking at the still smoking droid. ‘Irrelevant.’</p><p>‘But your aim’s near perfect,’ Luke answers. ‘Even if you close your eyes, you can throw a saber to land exactly on someone’s heart, no? Or in their eye, as you recently showed me.’</p><p>‘Sure.’</p><p>‘But if you throw lightning, you can’t even get it towards the general centre of their body. To me that looks like being out of control. Relatively speaking.’</p><p>‘It’s a blunt instrument.’ Ben rests, just briefly. His saber’s in hand but lowered. It’s been a tough session. He feels slightly over-exerted. ‘I don’t see the problem. It’s just something you don’t like because you associate it with darkness.’</p><p>‘I don’t like it because it’s sloppy,’ Luke answers, sounding unbothered by this taunt. ‘If you can control it so that it always hits, that’s an option, I guess. But I’ve never seen anyone who could do that. And it leaves people weak. It takes a lot out of them. That’s a vulnerability.’</p><p>‘I’ve killed people with it.’</p><p>‘I don’t doubt it.’</p><p>‘It’s part of what I want to do,’ Ben says, and he feels completely clear about it. ‘I’m not stopping it, and I’m not asking for your advice about it.’</p><p>Luke just sighs.</p><p>+</p><p> </p><p>He fights for real, of course. It’s not all training. His life consists of a lot of travel to a lot of places, where he does a lot of murdering. There are always Resistance outposts, bigger or smaller. There’s always trouble on every planet. His attention is focused on getting to the heart of the Resistance, wherever Leia is, wherever Rey is (which he supposes to be the same place). To end this will mean ending the Resistance.</p><p>Usually when he fights, it’s easy. The opponents don’t have the Force. He can sweep them to the side, saber them, push into their minds and tell them to throw themselves off a cliff, if he so chooses. It’s mostly boring.</p><p>Just once in a while it isn’t.</p><p>On Edrin, he’s outnumbered and outgunned. Things have gone wrong in the battle and he’s alone. He gave chase to someone and he jumped where ordinary men can’t follow, using the Force, propelling himself. He’s found himself surrounded, trapped exactly where they wanted him: on an island made of dense thickets, being swarmed by lifeforms.</p><p>He’s moving enemies away as fast as they can charge at him, but he can <em>feel</em> the Force ebbing out of him. There are limits to his power. This intensity isn’t something you can sustain for hours. His saber’s cutting people, drawing so much blood. His back’s against a rock, thank fuck, but there’s no possibly to leave this position without dying. There are too many of them, and he can’t –</p><p>He can sense part of it, but not the whole. He has a minor problem with that these days, an inconvenience. He feels for the Force, instinctive, blind, but what he can access is less than it should be. Something’s coming but –</p><p>‘Left,’ Luke voice suddenly says, urgent. ‘Duck left.’</p><p>Ben doesn’t bother to reflect on the trustworthiness of his uncle. He ducks left, at the precise moment that a sword flies to the spot that a second ago was his face.</p><p>He’s fighting someone off, sabering them through the heart, or near to it. Another’s coming and he sweeps them away with his hand. He’s cornered. At some point, he supposes their numbers will run out – but it might be a while, and it’s time that he doesn’t have.</p><p>He has to flee. Nothing for it. The plan had been annihilation. The plan’s changed.</p><p>He pushes hard with the Force, creating a ripple effect that knocks a few off them off guard, at least, and then, with the strength he has left, he jumps, far into the dense forest, not knowing where he is going to end up, not caring. He lands in a tangle of brambles and briars, painful. A tree appears to have smashed his arm on the descent. It might be broken, he’s not sure. Irrelevant. There’s foliage in his mouth, thorns scratching his face. The noise, not that far off, of shouting. They’ll give chase, of course.</p><p>He moves fast, the way he’s been trained, through the forest.</p><p>‘Saratha,’ Luke says, or his voice anyway. Ben can’t see him.</p><p>‘Can’t,’ he answers, because Luke means <em>sense with the Force</em>, and Ben can’t, not in the way that Luke means it.</p><p>He’s running fast. There’s the sound of water, a rushing, the sweep of a bird’s wing. Water is good. Water, he can use: he can move on it where enemies can’t. Sure enough, he can jump it, to a rocky island, little more than a few stones, and from there to the mainland. Both Force jumps, far beyond human capacity. He has strength enough for that. </p><p>As he lies there, gasping for breath, exhausted, he can’t help but reflect that Luke might have just saved his life. It’s an odd thought.</p><p> </p><p>+</p><p> </p><p>They open the training doing exactly what Ben wants, with no comment from Luke on this at all. He seems content to just waits until it’s his time to offer feedback.</p><p>‘You should tell me how to start,’ Ben says, a few mornings after the awkward situation on Edrin, which neither of them have said a word about. ‘It’s not professional to just let me do whatever.’</p><p>Luke’s eyebrow raises.</p><p>‘I wasn’t aware this was a professional relationship.’</p><p>‘It’s not a relationship at all.’</p><p>‘Right.’ His form flickers in and out, which Ben is beginning to suspect represents a lack of patience. ‘Sure.’</p><p>He steps forward, a little more present. ‘You want me to tell you what I think you should be starting this with?’</p><p>‘Yes.’</p><p>‘You already know that, Ben. The same thing you started with for ten years.’</p><p>‘I’m not interested in that. Those forms were a waste of time.’</p><p>‘Well, what else do you expect me to suggest?’</p><p>The atmosphere is thickening, but then all at once it seems to dissipate, as Luke just shrugs and sighs.</p><p>‘As you like,’ he says. ‘Let’s start differently then. What about this bit?’ He shows something, a move Ben’s known a long time as part as complicated opening form.</p><p>‘That’s not the sequence,’ he says, surprised. ‘That comes later.’</p><p>‘It could come first.’ Luke’s voice is light. ‘I taught you one thing, and you’re probably right that it was a waste of time for you. So let’s start here. It’s just a stretch, in the end. It doesn’t matter that much.’</p><p>He shakes his head, not liking that at all.</p><p>‘Fine,’ he says, and without even bothering to introduce it, he does, in fact, open the training session exactly as they used to, so many years ago, in what is, he thinks, still a perfect rendition of the form that he’d spent so many long years learning, the one that is supposed to bring peace of mind and focus to Jedi, but which had mostly brought him an urge to kill someone just to break the monotony.</p><p>It is just a stretch. That’s what he tells himself. It’s a conditioning thing, which has no relationship to any sort of Light or practice of the Light. It’s only body. Muscle. Skin. Nothing more than that. He’s just a physical entity, moving.  Water, light. The thoughts rise up, the old things.<br/><em><br/>Focus. Power. Empathy.</em></p><p>Those things are hard to find these days. Weakness doesn’t appeal. There’s no space for it in his life.</p><p>Luke only watches. When Ben finishes it, it doesn’t feel complete to him. There’s a jarring sense of tension that he can’t push away. He doesn’t ask Luke what to do next, because he already knows: he just repeats it so that’s better.</p><p>This time, he tries to focus more. The way he was taught was that if there was no sense of peace or clarity, it was because you weren’t thinking about what you were doing. So he tries again, really focusing. Every movement until he feels that he can breathe again. Feels <em>normal</em>, but he doesn’t know where that word comes from, because wasn’t he normal before? There’s Light everywhere. Even in him. Rey’s there, for a brief moment. She’s looking at him. She smiles.</p><p>He does it perfectly. He knows that.  </p><p>When Ben’s done with the second time, breathing heavily, it still takes Luke a long time to speak.</p><p>‘Okay,’ he says, but the word sounds like it comes from far away, very far. His voice is grizzled. ‘That’s…’</p><p>Ben carefully adjusts his body, back to the neutral stance that signals readiness to go further.</p><p>‘Is there a problem?’</p><p>Luke’s face is briefly illuminated. He looks old, and the shadow that passes through him makes him look as if he might be crying, just a single tear, a fleck of ghostly light.</p><p>‘No,’ he says, calmly. ‘No problem. You made no apparent mistakes, even after all this time.’</p><p><br/>+</p><p> </p><p>After that, Luke starts to refer to things by the terminology that Ben remembers from training with him – Jedi words, things he would never use himself but which he understands.</p><p>Only once does he not remember. Luke asks him to move to ‘darethna’ and he has no idea what the fuck that is.</p><p>‘I’m not familiar with the word,’ he says, and Luke blinks.</p><p>‘Yes you are.’</p><p>‘I don’t have any recollection of having heard it.’</p><p>‘We did it a lot.’ Luke’s voice is puzzled. He shows Ben, and then, embarrassingly he does remember it.</p><p>‘Oh. That.’ He mimics Luke, falling easily into the form. His uncle remains puzzled, watching this.</p><p> ‘How could you forget that? ‘</p><p>Ben shrugs.</p><p>Did you hit your head or something? Or was I just an exceptionally bad teacher?’</p><p> ‘Snoke dropped me hard on the floor a few times,’ Ben says casually, stretching out of the movement. ‘Perhaps it was that.’</p><p>‘What?’</p><p>‘He trained me to resist pain. To do that required a certain amount of pain, naturally.’</p><p>‘He Force-dropped you to the floor?’ Luke’s tone is horrified, his ghostly form tense with displeasure.</p><p>‘Sure. It helped me resist pain.’</p><p>‘No wonder you killed him.’</p><p>Ben shakes his head. ‘It wasn’t for that reason.’</p><p>‘From what height?</p><p>‘Hard to say. Maybe 80 feet. Not high. Why?’</p><p>‘What the…’ Luke’s tone has an edge, but he doesn’t continue. ‘And you let him? How old were you?’</p><p>‘Is this relevant? I’d prefer to practise. That’s why you’re here.’</p><p>‘How old?’</p><p>Ben thinks about it. ‘23, I suppose. It was when I first started. After…’</p><p>‘Yeah,’ Luke says, and there is a slight warning in his tone. ‘Don’t go there. There are things I don’t want to talk about either.’</p><p>‘As you wish. Well, it was after that. He taught me how to control my response to pain. It was important.’</p><p>‘He broke your shoulder that way,’ Luke surmises. ‘That’s how you fell.’</p><p>‘I broke my own shoulder,’ Ben corrects. ‘I should have –‘ he breaks off, unsure what exactly to add here that doesn’t sound transparently untrue.</p><p>Luke’s eyebrows are sky-high now. ‘Should have what?’</p><p>‘Been stronger.’</p><p>‘You were very strong,’ Luke says, and it’s not an encouragement or a kindness; it’s just a fact.</p><p>‘It wasn’t enough.’</p><p>‘I should have trained you better then.’ Luke sounds angry. ‘That’s on me.’</p><p>He snorts, not a laugh, never that. Something that might once have been one.</p><p>‘You’d have had to smash me to the floor yourself then.’</p><p>His uncle’s face flinches.</p><p>‘Not your style, I guess.’</p><p>‘No,’ Luke agrees, still sounding angry. ‘Not my style. But, I could have – maybe –‘</p><p>‘You couldn’t,’ Ben tells him, although he’s not sure why. ‘There was nothing you could have taught me at temple that would have helped. I had to learn it here.’</p><p>‘You didn’t have to learn it anywhere.’</p><p>Ben shakes his head, not wanting to understand this. The conversation is too close to something real, to all the things he doesn’t want.</p><p>‘There can be no purpose to this discussion,’ he says, cutting Luke off. ‘I just want you to show me how to train. I don’t need to talk about the methods Snoke used. I agreed with them.’</p><p>Luke just sighs. ‘Go ahead, then.’</p><p>So they do.</p><p> </p><p>+</p><p><br/><br/>‘I hate what Snoke did to you,’ Luke says that night. He sounds angry, which surprises Ben. ‘It was wrong.’</p><p>He is lying on the bed, shoes toed off, exhausted. The training schedule is taking a lot of out of him. He can practically feel his muscles groaning at the unwelcome strain, the toughness of Luke’s demand for accuracy.</p><p>‘It worked. It helped me.’</p><p>‘It broke your shoulder.’</p><p>‘You’re blinded by love for the Ben Solo you knew. If you look at it dispassionately…’</p><p>‘I am looking at it dispassionately. Good trainers don’t let their students pick up the bad habits you’ve picked up here. They certainly don’t drop their students from 80 feet. They don’t teach them that way.’</p><p>‘I didn’t object to the method.’</p><p>‘Yes you did,’ Luke says. ‘I know you did. It must have hurt. You must have been so frightened. You were 23. How could you have known how to deal with something like that? You’d been so – shielded.’</p><p> ‘I felt nothing but respect for the Supreme Leader.’</p><p>‘Ben, you said there was nothing I could have done, but that wasn’t true.’ Luke’s voice is very present, here in the stillness of the night. ‘I couldn’t have dropped you to the floor, but I could have told you that people did that. I could have told you more about all of the things they did.’</p><p>‘You didn’t know those things.’</p><p>‘I knew enough. I know Snoke was there. I sensed more than that. Intentions. There were things I should have done.’</p><p>‘Guilt is meaningless,’ he tells him. ‘It only holds you down. It’s a pointless weight. You should let it go.’</p><p>Luke doesn’t say anything else. The next day, they carry on training.</p><p>+</p><p> </p><p>His left wrist is slightly, just slightly, defective, he knows. He’s been wondering when Luke is going to notice it too.</p><p> They are training with the saber, and when he has to operate it on his left side, he always has to grit his teeth a little to master it. More so than he should. He hides it pretty well, but his uncle’s sharp when it comes to that sort of thing.</p><p>‘Something up with your wrist?’ Luke says, eyeing it, perhaps noticing that it hurts particularly badly today.</p><p>‘I damaged it a few years ago.’</p><p>‘How?’</p><p>‘It was nothing.’</p><p>‘Can I see it?’</p><p>‘If you wish.’</p><p>He holds out his wrist, and Luke, ghostly, floats over to it to look at it. There is a distorted lump of flesh there, misshapen slightly around the bone, with a burn mark above.</p><p>‘What the hell is that?’ Luke says. ‘Why didn’t you heal it? Looks like you left it broken for too long.’</p><p>This is exactly what did happen.</p><p>‘I couldn’t get to the med-bay on time. In the circumstances.’</p><p>‘Were you in battle?’</p><p>‘No, training.’</p><p>‘With Snoke, I suppose?’</p><p>‘Naturally.’</p><p>‘Did he break it on purpose?’ Luke asks, his tone too light. ‘Was this another pain resistance teaching?’</p><p>‘It broke during our training.’</p><p>‘And the burn mark? Is there any point asking about that?’</p><p>‘I made too much noise,’ Ben says, flatly. ‘It was my fault.’</p><p>Luke’s form flickers suddenly, and for a brief moment, he looks almost solid, as if he is alive and present.</p><p>But then he just shakes his head, and the illusion disappears.</p><p>‘Well,’ he says. ‘It looks like you might want to strengthen it, if you can.’</p><p>Ben doesn’t see fit to mention that it is actually ever so slightly broken, and it’s been that way for six years. It no longer matters to him. He’s overcome it.</p><p> </p><p>+</p><p> </p><p>He washes the blood off in the fresher, the water running clean. It was one of those days.</p><p>Lifeforms fall easily. When you choke them, there’s no blood. That’s a simple, clean execution. But when you cut them clean open with a saber, it’s different. There’s always blood then.</p><p>They’d been Resistance sympathisers, and he’d gone to watch the operation mostly because of that, and because he’d sensed something there that he hadn’t liked. It felt like Rey, but she hadn’t been there in the end. It was a memory of her, which meant she’d been there once upon a time. She’d known those people, either in passing or as friends.</p><p>He'd killed them much as he always kills people. The only difference was Luke watching him, although he’d never said a word.</p><p> </p><p>+</p><p> </p><p>Sometimes they walk around the compound, the ruins of the planet that hovers below Snoke’s old base that now belongs to Ben. Luke never really comments on anything they pass, although Ben is sure he has thoughts about it.</p><p>It’s only once that he says something. They’re standing by the place. It ripples with the Force, all broken.</p><p>‘What’ here?’ Luke says. ‘It feels…’</p><p>‘Bodies,’ Ben says. It is the mass grave for dumping the ashes and remains of prisoners.</p><p>‘Ah.’</p><p>He doesn’t specify that it’s the former Jedi and the various other people who’ve died here, all piled on top of each other. He assumes that’s obvious to Luke, just as it is to him. Dead Jedi leave traces.</p><p>They just tip the bodies there and leave them to rot. It’s efficient, he supposes, as graveyards go.</p><p>‘You don’t mind walking past people’s open graves?’</p><p>‘I’ve put the past behind me. They’re just bodies.’</p><p>‘Sure.’ Luke’s form flickers in and out. ‘Surprising you don’t notice anything. With you being so force sensitive and all. Because I’m dead, and I can feel it like it’s a gaping hole in the universe.’</p><p>He shrugs. ‘I sense it. I just don’t care.’</p><p>‘Are the former students here?’ Luke asks, in a dangerously conversational tone.</p><p>‘Yes, if you mean your former students.’</p><p>‘All dead except one,’ Luke says, looking at him.</p><p>‘Yes, well. I wasn’t as weak as they were.’</p><p>‘You know, you’ve become a horrible person,’ Luke says, although his tone is phlegmatic rather than accusatory.</p><p>‘I know.’</p><p>Ben just shrugs. He really doesn’t care. They walk the rest of the way in silence, and remain silent until the next morning’s training session.</p><p> </p><p>+</p><p> </p><p>Rey’s there that evening. She appears sometimes in his thoughts, although less often in his waking hours. She’s standing by the window, looking out onto the space beyond.</p><p>‘Hi,’ she says, turning, sensing that he’s there. ‘This again.’</p><p>She’s dressed in white. She looks like a Jedi these days more than ever, although he can sense that she’s afraid.</p><p>‘You’re afraid,’ he says, not leading into it. ‘Why?’</p><p>‘You really need to ask?’</p><p>‘It’s not too late to –‘ he starts, intending to say ‘join me’ or ‘turn’ or something like that, but he can’t seem to find it in himself this evening. She fairly obviously isn’t going to.</p><p>‘To what?’ There’s a smile in her voice. ‘Please don’t go through that routine again.’</p><p>‘Yeah, okay. As long as you don’t go through it with me.’</p><p>She blinks, surprised.</p><p>‘Jedi don’t have to fear,’ he tells her, although he doesn’t really know why. ‘Fear holds you back from being the person you need to be.’</p><p>‘You’d know. You’re afraid too.’</p><p>‘I’m not a Jedi.’</p><p>‘Neither am I. There’s no one left to train me, thanks to you.’ She moves a step towards him. Her saber’s in hand, he notices. She smells like wood smoke.</p><p>‘Is something near you burning?’ he asks, but she doesn’t answer; only smiles, a little distant. Takes another step.</p><p>‘Stop killing my friends, Ben,’ she says, distinctly. She fades out as softly as if she’d never been there at all.</p><p>+</p><p> </p><p>‘That’s fine,’ Luke says, which is what he nearly always says, as Ben does some stupid Force thing, just practising what he already knows, ‘but can you try to sense it, rather than looking for the attack so consciously? That was the problem on Edrin too.’</p><p>There are answers to that which he can’t give. This conversation was always coming, he supposes, but he’d hoped it would be further away.</p><p>‘I’ve forgotten how to do it,’ he says, which is part of the truth.</p><p>There’s a frozen moment.<br/><br/>‘Forgotten,’ Luke repeats, the word landing cool. ‘As in…?’</p><p>‘I didn’t find it useful. I stopped using it. I forgot.’</p><p>‘But –‘ his uncle’s face is puzzled. ‘Is it not – I mean, do you not need…’ He breaks off. ‘This is one of those things,’ he says. ‘The things I won’t understand and I don’t want to ask about. You’ll have to close your eyes, then, and try to remember.’</p><p>Ben shakes his head. He never closes his eyes to sense. He doesn’t like the Force overtaking him blind. It’s something he used to do naturally, when he was little – but which he’s been obliged, for certain reasons, to stop.</p><p>‘I don’t close my eyes.’</p><p>There’s a pause.                                                                          .</p><p>‘Because?’ Luke asks, a conscious calm in his voice.</p><p>‘I don’t find it necessary.’</p><p>‘So how can you sense?’</p><p>‘I prefer to trust physical reality. The Force is more useful to me in other ways.’</p><p>Luke stares at him, or so Ben thinks, because given his insubstantial appearance, it’s sometimes hard to tell what his face is displaying.</p><p>‘I –‘ He pauses. ‘Okay. So you prefer to use the Force to attack, manipulate objects, and so on. You don’t like to sense through it, not as such. Not without filters. Not without  specific direction of trying to find someone or something. Is that right?’</p><p>‘Yes.’</p><p>‘Why?’</p><p>‘I am under no obligation to explain.’</p><p>There’s an unmistakable sigh, but then Luke seems to regain himself.</p><p>‘Fine then,’ he says, simply. ‘Go back with your saber. You were off on the second footing just now.’</p><p><br/>+</p><p> </p><p>He dreams about it sometimes, even now. In dreams, he moves within the Force, like he used to, without consciously controlling it. He can see the whole world, shadowed, flecked with light. Intentions. The future. Other people. All sorts of things are easier to see like this.</p><p>+</p><p> </p><p>They carry on. The bombing on Tressor is a success. The Resistance is weakening, coming apart piece by piece. Sometimes he catches whispers of Rey’s thoughts. They are full of despair.</p><p>He knows that Luke must hate it, but if he does, he never says a word about it. He just trains with him, hovering there, a little quieter some days than others. He offers advice that is generally practical, and usually – although Ben wouldn’t say it to him – more on the side of helpful than annoying.</p><p>It's only the sensing thing that’s the problem. Luke skirts around the issue, but Ben can read him well enough to know it’s there in his thoughts. It’s only at the end of a particularly frustrating session that he mentions it directly.</p><p> ‘You’ll have to sense it,’ Luke says. ‘I know you don’t like it, but I simply don’t see another way to do this. And I don’t understand your problem with it, so –‘</p><p> ‘It’s not necessary,’ he says, keeping his tone cool.</p><p>Luke just raises an eyebrow.</p><p>‘For someone inhabiting it every day, you seem pretty frightened of giving yourself over to the Force,’ he says, although he isn’t angry.</p><p>‘Fear has no role in this.’</p><p>‘No?’ Luke says. ‘So, what exactly <em>is</em> stopping you?’</p><p> ‘I can sense without it. I have everything I need.’</p><p>‘Great,’ Luke says. ‘So, show me again how well you know what’s coming, if you can’t hear or see them.’</p><p>‘I don’t need it.’</p><p>‘Right. So being able to apprehend your enemies’ approach, to anticipate it, has no use to you?’</p><p>‘You’re misrepresenting its relevancy for your own purposes.’</p><p>‘Ben,’ Luke says, his tone very clear. ‘You almost died on Edrin. You would have died, if I hadn’t been there. You need to be able to see around you.’</p><p>He raises his hand, cutting Ben off as he’s about to speak.</p><p>‘I get it,’ Luke says, interrupting. ‘You are another person. The old life is gone. Don’t go over it again, it’s all clear to me. My point is, it’s a physical skill. It’s not an emotional thing. It’s not about being a good person. You don’t have to be a Jedi to do it. Fuck’s sake, Vader did it, and isn’t he your hero these days? It’s just a skill you learned. And I don’t understand why you can’t do it now.’</p><p>‘I prefer not to.’</p><p>‘It’s a bad decision. It doesn’t make sense. It wouldn’t have made sense to Ben Solo. It doesn’t make sense to you as Kylo Ren. It lacks strategy.’</p><p>‘I’ve survived so far.’</p><p>‘Yeah, but for how long? The Resistance is breaking. You know that; you can sense it. They’re lashing out. They’re angry and trapped. People who are angry and trapped get dangerous because they have nothing to lose.’</p><p>‘They can’t hurt me.’</p><p>‘They can.’ Luke’s voice is calm. ‘They can put their last resources into killing you, even though they know it’s futile, assuming the situation’s desperate enough. You know how it works, Ben. You know what resistance is built on. What do you think they’d do, if they only had enough power left to try to hurt you?’</p><p>‘They’d kill me in the hope that even after their own deaths, my absence would still lead to a better world.’</p><p> And it’s not just them. It’s your allies here. They want your power. You need to be stronger.’</p><p>‘I don’t understand why you’re offering this advice.’</p><p>‘I’m training you. We made an agreement that I’d help you without judgement of what you’d do with the help. You need to be able to sense better. Whatever the reason is that you can’t close your eyes and can’t be out of control, you need to let it go.’</p><p> ‘It won’t work as you expect,’ he tells him. ‘You’ll see.’</p><p>And then – for the first time in a long time - he does it, already knowing what to expect. His eyes are closed. He steps out of conscious sensing, into the place that belongs to the Force. The darkness is everywhere. The training droids gear into action at his voice command, and he senses how they move, willing it through the Force. He can sense everything they’re doing. The mechanics. The movement. Luke’s right that it’s a physical skill. It costs him nothing to do it. It comes so naturally.  </p><p>It’s only that he hates seeing like this. There’s so much darkness. It’s everywhere, clinging to him, on his skin, under his fingernails. It’s thick, matted onto him, like dried blood, dried gunk. He can’t get it out. He’ll never get it out. He can feel all the places where he doesn’t like this and doesn’t want it to be who he is.</p><p>The graves outside are screaming with it. He can feel it, radiating its malevolence. Sharp, jagged edges. He is the edges, or one of them anyway. He is one sharp cut of a vast and terrifying weapon, made of a thousand blades, spread far and wide across the galaxy. He has to stop it, but he can’t. He is a part of it.<br/><br/>He feels sick. He really doesn’t like this. Everywhere, everywhere. Is Luke really <em>here</em>? His senses are confused. Is that Luke or him? There’s something, but he’s not sure that -</p><p>He feels a sudden cut to him; realises a training droid is jabbing him. Opens his eyes with a snap and slices the bastard thing in two before it can do more damage.</p><p> There’s blood running down his side. He’s been cut on the upper arm, just a shallow cut. He’s gasping for air. He feels skinned.</p><p> ‘Fuck,’ Luke says. ‘No wonder you didn’t want to close your eyes. What the hell was that?’</p><p> He shakes his head. A storm of rage is brewing now, flies buzzing around him, gathering. He feels vulnerable.<br/><br/>‘I don’t want to see,’ he says. ‘Don’t make me do that.’</p><p>‘Ah,’ Luke says. He looks, suddenly, much more solid. His face seems to display a trace of understanding. ‘You don’t like looking? Is that what it is, then?’</p><p>He shakes his head, trying to regain some control.</p><p> ‘Okay,’ Luke says, simply. ‘Okay then. Don’t close your eyes. We’ll have to find another way. We’ll do it the way you prefer.’</p><p>‘I did tell you,’ he says. He almost spits the words out, still feeling sick. ‘I can’t do it anymore, Un—’</p><p>He breaks off before he can finish the word, but Luke must have heard it anyway.</p><p>He’s shaking. It takes him a couple of minutes before he can start to train again. Luke must notice, but he doesn’t say a word.</p><p> </p><p>+</p><p>He doesn’t sleep much that night, for various reasons. There are better and worse days and this is a <em>worse</em>. At some point he gives up on it and gets up, pacing the ship. Reads some reports that came in late. Stares vacantly at the endless lines of plastic and metal that make up this home of his. Walks some more.</p><p>He uses the Force, absently, twisting a piece of metal into shapes with his mind. Once upon a time he thinks it had been a chair, before he made it into a toy. Bending it round, it curves almost gently, arcing.</p><p>‘You used to do that,’ Luke says behind him, and his voice is low. Ben turns to face him, irritated.</p><p>‘Don’t distract me.’</p><p>His uncle snorts, a single, hoarse laugh. ‘From what exactly? You’re just twisting a piece of metal around.’</p><p>He feels anger rising up, and he’s ready to launch –</p><p>‘Personally I’d shape it into something more jagged,’ Luke says, eying it. He sounds more amused than anything. ‘I don’t think I’d curve it.’</p><p>‘What you would have done is nothing to me.’</p><p> ‘Sure.’ Luke still sounds almost light-hearted. ‘As you wish. I’m going to meditate now, which is as close to sleep as I get.’</p><p>‘You don’t sleep?’ Ben asks, although he isn’t interested in the answer.</p><p>‘Not in the general way. I take rest.’</p><p>He sets the metal down, from where it has been floating mid-air. Turns to Luke.</p><p>‘You want to talk about earlier. The sensing thing.’</p><p>His uncle’s face doesn’t express much, but he at least makes full eye contact.</p><p>‘The sensing thing,’ he repeats. ‘Well, yeah. I guess I kind of do want to talk about it.’</p><p>‘Say what you want to say.’</p><p>His saber’s not raised, but he’s holding it fairly tightly. It won’t help, but it might at least make him feel better, depending on what’s coming.</p><p>‘I find it weird that you can’t do it,’ Luke says. ‘Because you used to be able to. But I accept that you’re not Ben Solo. That’s something he could do, not you. And that’s fine.’</p><p> ‘How can it be fine?’</p><p>‘Is it not fine?’</p><p>‘<em>No</em>,’ Ben says, irritably. ‘Of course it isn’t. It’s an incapacitation. You saw that on Edrin. I can’t see what’s coming. Fuck’s sake, it’s embarrassing. Dangerous too.’</p><p>A moment’s pause.</p><p>‘Well,’ Luke says, sounding thoughtful. ‘I suppose you could try again. What exactly happens when you do it?’</p><p>‘I see too many things. It’s distracting.’</p><p>‘You see all the things that are here?’ Luke interprets. ‘Things that aren’t easy to see?’</p><p>Ben doesn’t answer that but he doesn’t have to answer. Luke already knows.</p><p>‘It’s fixable,’ he says eventually, when some time has elapsed. When Ben has crushed another piece of metal into shards. ‘You do know that? It’s not an unsolvable problem.’</p><p>It is to him. It’s been this way for years and he can’t find a way past it. He rubs his eyes, tired, perhaps even exhausted. It’s the middle of the night, and the only thing he wants is to sleep.</p><p>‘I haven’t found the way.’</p><p>‘How could you have done, if no one helped you and you didn’t know the answer?’</p><p>‘I need no help from anyone.’</p><p>Luke just sighs.</p><p>‘In the morning,’ he says. ‘We’ll try then.’</p><p>Everything annoys him. He has no patience, nor time, nor energy to spare on Luke.</p><p>‘I won’t sleep. We can try now.’</p><p>And then, without waiting for an answer, he closes his eyes, and senses, and once again there’s so much darkness everywhere, all over him. He’s coated in the stuff, like thick tar. It’s disgusting: mucinous and impossible to shake off –</p><p>This is so completely wrong. What the fuck is he doing?</p><p>He feels sick, again. About to open his eyes, because he <em>can’t, </em>he can’t -</p><p> ‘Just breathe through it,’ Luke says, and his voice is calm and strong, and full of Light. ‘Look for the balance. Don’t worry about that. The person thinking your thoughts is in charge, not the stuff you’re seeing.’</p><p>‘I can’t not worry about it,’ he says, because it’s impossible to lie in this state, and his uncle’s voice seems to echo in his head, so very clear. He holds onto it like an anchor.</p><p>‘You still know everything you used to know. All the things you ever learned. Try to remember them.’</p><p>‘Those things are dead.’</p><p>‘Not dead,’ Luke says, calmly. ‘Just a bit farther away. You don’t have to believe in them yourself. You just have to know they’re there.’</p><p>The darkness seems to loosen, somehow, as if he’s stepping out of a restraint, or at least letting it a little looser.  He can see better now, can sense better. The room doesn’t look quite as frightening after all. He does remember how to do this. He still can do it.</p><p>‘Good work,’ Luke says, crisply. ‘Stay where you are.’</p><p>He breathes it in. There is some sort of balance to the universe. He’s covered in filth, but it’s not the only thing there is. He can breathe. He can sense a lot of things, just at the edges of his vision. There’s a clarity to it. He can see Rey, not so far away now. There’s activity downstairs, some solider or another. Prisoners, held below. A great many things that are happening. He breathes them all in, and there’s a kind of power to it.</p><p>When he opens his eyes, Luke’s form is so extraordinarily present that it is hard to believe he’s just a ghost.</p><p> ‘Okay?’ he says, tone light. ‘This is fine, right? You’re just looking around.’</p><p> Ben thinks about it. He feels winded, like he’s just run a sudden sprint. He also feels less like putting his fist through a wall than usual.</p><p> He nods.</p><p>‘Okay.’</p><p> He goes back to his quarters to sleep and finds that he can just about manage it.</p><p>+<br/><br/></p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0003"><h2>3. Chapter 3</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>That night, she stands there again, in some faraway place he can barely see. Wherever she is, it’s raining. It smells damp and it feels like woodlands. Leaves, mud, bracken. He’s not surprised that he can see her.</p><p>‘How are you?’ he asks, which he’s never asked her before, but which seems pertinent now. She asks him; why can’t he ask her?</p><p>Her face is surprised, but not as hostile as he deserves.</p><p>‘How am I?’</p><p>‘Yes.’</p><p>‘I wasn’t aware we did social conversation.’</p><p>He shrugs. ‘We could.’</p><p>‘You can sense it. You know how I am.’</p><p>‘Still afraid.’</p><p>‘Still not a Jedi,’ she says, sighing. She sits down, wherever she is. He doesn’t mind that. He sits opposite her, looking at her.</p><p>‘It usually takes more than week.’ That’s how long it’s been since he saw her last, give or take. ‘Or a year, or even three.’</p><p>‘How long did it take you?’</p><p>‘Nine years. But I didn’t finish my training with Luke.’</p><p>‘I had two days with him.’ She shrugs. ‘Which was a bit of a waste of time, but I suppose he had other things on his mind.’</p><p> ‘It’s raining where you are,’ he says, sensing it, almost able to touch where she is. ‘I can smell the rain on the earth. Is it the same place that smelled of woodsmoke?’</p><p>‘Yes.’ Her eyes are bright. ‘But where you are, I can’t feel anything at all. It’s the same ship, I suppose. Where you killed Snoke.’</p><p>‘That’s right. I think I’d prefer the rain.’</p><p>She smiles.</p><p>‘You’re the supreme leader, aren’t you? Can’t you make it rain? Or go somewhere where it is?’</p><p>‘I can’t make it rain.’</p><p>‘Limits to even your power,’ she says, almost laughing.</p><p>They’re sitting very close to each other, he can’t help but notice. He can hear her breathing. The steady sound of rainfall; the steady sound of her breath. </p><p>‘Limits to my power,’ he repeats. ‘I can’t make it snow either.’</p><p>‘Mm.’ She smiles. ‘What can you really even do?’</p><p>‘Oh, you know. Just some small stuff.’</p><p>‘Ben,’ she says, and her voice is more urgent now. ‘Or whatever you want to be called. I don’t want to make it rain. But I do need help. I feel so lost.’</p><p>‘Lost how?’</p><p>She reaches with her hand, just as she had before. He ungloves his hand, just as he had before. Takes hers in his own.</p><p>‘I don’t really understand any of it.’</p><p>‘You need a teacher. And not just for two days.’</p><p>‘Are you offering?’</p><p>He blinks. Before he can answer her, she’s gone.</p><p><br/>+</p><p> </p><p> His uncle’s watching him whirling through a lightsaber move that requires some extreme agility on his left side. He can overcome the pain in his wrist, overcome the mis-healed break, but there are times when he knows it still shows. And as he stops, breathing hard, he notices Luke’s attention is on it too.</p><p>Since he started to sense things better, he’s more aware of Luke’s attention on him, at the edges of his mind. His uncle is watching him. Not continually, but persistently. He’s observing, and he can see Ben’s wrist hurts.</p><p>‘It’s broken,’ he says, curtly. ‘Just a little. It doesn’t matter.’</p><p>His uncle looks at him. Ben does nothing, just stretches, preparing to continue the routine.</p><p>‘Well?’ Luke says, putting up a steadying hand, asking him to stop. ‘Aren’t you going to fix it? Doesn’t it hurt?’</p><p>‘Pain is meaningless. It’s something only weak people feel. I've overcome it through the Force. Pain is nothing to me.’</p><p>‘Ah,’ Luke says. ‘I see. Well, be that as it may, you can’t possibly continue training with me with a broken wrist. I’d prefer that we looked at how we can fix it.’</p><p>He hesitates, but not as much as he should.</p><p>‘I don’t think the med-drones know how. They don’t pick up on it as an injury.’</p><p>‘Why not?’</p><p>‘I don’t feel enough pain. I can move it normally.’</p><p>‘Almost normally.’</p><p>‘Yes, almost.’</p><p>‘Do you think…’ Luke trails off. He seems very solid in this moment, almost as if Ben could reach out to touch him. ‘Maybe if you experienced the pain of it, they might respond? If they’re pain-sensitive droids.’</p><p>‘I don’t know how to do that anymore.’</p><p>‘For fuck’s sake,’ Luke says, which is just astonishing, given his general neutrality. ‘Just feel into the injury. Let it in a bit. Can you really not do that?’</p><p>‘It’s completely unimportant,’ Ben says. ‘It hasn’t concerned me in six years. Why should it matter now?’</p><p>‘Six years?’ Luke says. ‘I cannot train you, cannot possibly train you, when you have a six year old broken bone that stops you from moving normally.’</p><p>‘It took you a while to notice. It is clearly not a major problem.’</p><p>‘No,’ Luke says. ‘It didn’t. I noticed it the minute I arrived here, the first time I watched you train. Just like I noticed your inexplicable decision to amputate your own senses. I just didn’t want to ask about it.’</p><p>‘Why? I would have answered. It doesn’t concern me.’</p><p>‘It concerns me,’ Luke says. ‘I don’t understand why you have an unfixed broken wrist. I don’t understand how you can see that as advantageous to you. And frankly, I didn’t really want to hear your reasons. I suspected they might be things I couldn’t understand.’</p><p>‘There <em>are</em> things you don’t –‘</p><p>‘Ben,’ Luke says, interrupting. ‘Please fix your wrist. I think it will help you if you do.’</p><p> He can see the point Luke is making. He can see that the best is just to show him that it’s unfixable, because he’s trained too well to overcome the pain.</p><p>‘It won’t work,’ he tells him and they go to the medbay. Ben sits there, letting the droids scan him. As ever, they fuss around doing nothing, not noticing his wrist. They sew up a tiny cut, something irrelevant. They clean the lightsaber gash on his face, test his shoulder where he was cut – flex it, whirr with their industry. It’s basically fine now. He should have started doing some of this Jedi stuff years ago.</p><p>They graze by the wrist without even picking up a trace of a problem.</p><p>‘They can’t sense it,’ he says. ‘They never do.’</p><p>Luke says, ‘Try. Imagine it’s just happened.’</p><p>‘It was a long time ago.’</p><p>‘I know that. Try to remember what it was like to be there. However it happened. There must have been initial pain.’</p><p>He does try, but he can’t access the memory.</p><p>‘Try to listen for the sound of the bone cracking,’ Luke says.</p><p>He manages that. He can actually remember the<em> noise</em>. Just not the feelings surrounding it.</p><p>There is a tingle of pain there. He grits his teeth.</p><p>‘Try to focus on it,’ Luke says. ‘I know it’s not fun. But you need to fix your wrist now.’</p><p>So he does focus on it, obsessively, exhaustively, tracing that pain down and around in his fingers, his arm, the join of the bone. It’s slow to come. It takes one spit of pain, and then another, and then another, and then the first week of agony, and the second, and third, on and on, until it gets to now, six years later.</p><p>It’s slow, and it hurts. Of course it hurts.</p><p>Luke’s there, solidly present, unreasonably benevolent.</p><p>‘It’s all right,’ he says. ‘They’re going to fix it now. Look at me, I’m here.’</p><p>He does look at him. He can almost make out Luke’s exact face, the lines of it, the things he remembers from his childhood.</p><p>He’s smiling. He looks like he’s okay.</p><p>Ben tries to hold onto that. Bizarrely, it helps. He thought he hated Luke. Perhaps he does, just not in quite the way he thought he did. In some other way.</p><p>It really, <em>really</em> hurts. It’s a supernova of pain. All of it, all at once. He wonders if he might be dying. He thinks he might pass out. He’s seeing stars, his vision is clouding over with them. He’s not able to keep going like this.</p><p>And then, as the droid works, buzzes urgently, they shoot him with something, some kind of pain suppressant – which he doesn’t like because he doesn’t need them – and then…</p><p>Then he comes to, and for the first time in six years it doesn’t hurt at all.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>+</p><p>‘You should rest it,’ Luke says, afterwards, as they move towards the training room. ‘It needs to set properly.’</p><p>‘It’s fine. I feel fine.’</p><p>He actually feels a bit dizzy. The pain medications were very strong, and he’s not used to them. He can feel them circulating in his system, fogging him over.</p><p>‘No,’ Luke says. ‘Sit down. No training. Sit.’</p><p>He sits on the floor of the training room, cross-legged. His wrist doesn’t hurt, but it feels strange. He feels strange.</p><p>Luke keeps his voice steady. ‘Are you going to attack me if I suggest meditating?’</p><p>‘I meditate.’</p><p>‘Yeah,’ Luke says. ‘Okay. Do you think you might be able to meditate now on something other than pain suppression? Since that’s clearly all you’ve been doing for six years.’</p><p>‘That’s not all I did.’</p><p>Luke gives him a look. ‘It was a large part of it. How much control did it take to hold all that under wraps for so long?’</p><p>‘It was a part of my practice,’ he admits.</p><p>‘So, would you be okay with trying another part?'</p><p>‘You don’t have to help me,’ Ben says.</p><p>‘Someone ought to,’ Luke says, rather darkly. ‘Close your eyes. You know this one. I won’t make you sense, if you don’t want to.’</p><p>It’s weird, but he actually doesn’t mind following his orders.  Maybe it’s the drugs, their after-effect. He feels strangely absent from himself. He feels strange.</p><p>‘It’s okay,’ he says, feeling that it really is. ‘I can handle it. I like it. It’s good to remember it.’</p><p>‘Like?’ Luke repeats, eyebrow raised again. ‘I didn’t know you liked things.’</p><p>‘I’m a person,’ Ben tells him, drowsily. ‘Obviously I like things, Luke.’</p><p>There’s a pause.</p><p>‘Okay then.’ His uncle ‘s voice is unusually friendly. ‘Let’s do something you …like. Personally like.’</p><p>He closes his eyes to sense, and it comes naturally. The world ebbs and flows. Rey’s there, just like she always is. He likes seeing her. She’s a reassuring presence in the world. The last Jedi. Something like that, anyway.</p><p>‘She’s training,’ he tells Luke, and he doesn’t need to qualify the pronoun. There’s only one she.</p><p>‘I sense that.’</p><p>‘She’s getting stronger.’</p><p>‘She’ll have to be stronger still, if you’re planning to fight her. You could kill her easily.’</p><p>‘I won’t do that.’</p><p> He’s high, he realises dimly. The things he’s saying aren’t what they would usually be.</p><p>‘Yeah, I got that. Any… reason for that? Or is this one of the mysteries of Kylo Ren that I couldn’t possibly understand.’</p><p>‘It doesn’t feel right. What’s the point?’</p><p>‘Good question.’</p><p>‘I talk to her sometimes.’ He lies down, drifting. The Force seems to lift him, so he floats. He’s used to that. He can feel Luke’s energy, steadying it, so he doesn’t float too far away. He’s used to that too. Occupational hazard: students floating away too far. Luke always anchored them. There’s nothing to worry about here; he keeps his eyes closed, drifting, like it’s the old days.</p><p>‘What about?’</p><p>‘She asked me to teach her.’</p><p>He senses Luke’s surprise at that, and he almost smiles.</p><p>‘You’re shocked.’</p><p>‘A bit.’ Luke’s tone is careful. ‘I wasn’t aware you were… that close. That Rey would want that from you.’</p><p>‘Right, and you think I’m a Sith.’ Ben turns to him, looks at him through the Force, where Luke is substantial and real. ‘That I would want to teach her to come to the Dark Side and do all the –‘ He gestures, vaguely. ‘Choking stuff.’</p><p>‘That did kind of seem to be how it was.’</p><p> ‘It’s complicated, Luke. You don’t see everything.’</p><p>‘What don’t I see?’</p><p>‘I’m meant to train her.’ Ben lets the Force cushion him, indifferent to it, rising higher on the air; much too high. He can’t fall if Luke is here.</p><p> ‘That’s what I’m supposed to do. I don’t know why, but what does that matter? That’s what I sense.’</p><p>Luke smiles; Ben can actually see it. It’s a genuine smile.</p><p> ‘All right.’ His uncle seems at ease.</p><p>‘I think I could teach her the practical things from temple,’ Ben says, hesitant. ‘The forms. Et cetera.’</p><p>‘You could do that.’ Luke smiles again. ‘You’re floating too high, kid. Focus now. Away from Rey, pretty as she is.’</p><p>He does. <em>Really</em> he does. It’s not that bad this time. He can breathe a bit better. There’s still all the dark stuff, but it’s not the same. He’s got some distance from it.</p><p>Being told what to do, being a Padawan again. It’s actually almost relaxing.  It’s not like anyone knows about it. In a way, all of this is only happening in his head. No one else can see Luke, nor hear him. He’s floating. His body is weightless.</p><p>‘Great,’ Luke says. ‘Tell me what you see.’</p><p>He does.</p><p>‘Darkness,’ he says. ‘Light. The usual.’</p><p>‘And?’</p><p>‘Balance.’</p><p>‘Step into the balance,’ Luke says. ‘Hold onto it.’</p><p>He steps, without even thinking about it, and realises he’s standing towards the Light, close to his uncle. He’s present in feelings of contentment, ease, and release from pain.  He can see Luke very clearly here, because they’re both in spirit.</p><p>He remembers this from so long ago. It’s nothing something Snoke ever did. He wouldn’t have wanted Kylo Ren to stand with him, to see him in this way. It’s too intimate, too raw.</p><p>Luke’s spirit, on the other hand, seems to be welcoming. He feels a certain benevolence towards him. He lets it in, and even – just a fraction – returns it.  Luke’s surprise gives way to pleasure. His benevolence increases, as if he is reaching out a hand to Ben, to put on his shoulder, to greet him.</p><p>Within the force, it feels exactly as if they are smiling at each other.</p><p>‘My wrist doesn’t hurt,’ he says, and it’s confusing.</p><p>‘Right. It hurt a lot before.’</p><p>‘Yes. All the time.’</p><p>‘I –‘ His uncle’s expression is unreadable. ‘You’re high as shit on whatever pain medication you gave. None of this is real. But what the hell were you doing, Ben, suffering through that? I want to know, even if you forget you ever told me the answer.’</p><p> ‘I think I was just lying to myself that it was fine. You know how all this shit goes. Jedis pretending they’re removed from it, when actually they’re just feeling powerless and in pain. It was always like that, right?’</p><p>‘Mm. I know something about that.’</p><p> ‘You went to that fucking island,’ Ben says, aware that he shouldn’t, ‘and I’m sure you told yourself you were serving a higher selfless purpose by doing something really fucking selfish.’</p><p>‘I wasn’t aware you had any strong opinion on it.’</p><p>‘You should have been with the Resistance. Not just to die heroically at the end. That’s the easy bit. You should have been there all the time.’</p><p>‘So should you.’</p><p>‘I don’t know about that.’</p><p>‘Ben,’ his uncle says suddenly, and he’s gentle. ‘I’m so sorry. I should have trained you better. You were my student and the way it ended up, someone using the Force threw you 80 feet and they broke your wrist and shoulder. I kind of think that’s on me.’</p><p>‘I chose to fuck everything up,’ he says, not understanding. ‘I fucked up your temple. I killed everyone. What happened to me afterwards isn’t your problem. You don’t have to care.’</p><p>‘Fucked everything up,’ Luke repeats. ‘Is that what you think?’</p><p>‘What would you call it?’</p><p>‘No, I’d definitely call it fucking everything up. I’m just surprised you would.’</p><p>‘I don’t know.’</p><p>Luke’s voice is bone-dry. ‘Yeah, I’m starting to get that. Very much get that.’</p><p>‘You think I’m conflicted.’</p><p>‘Well, yeah.’ Luke’s still so calm, and Ben feels spaced out, relaxed. Far away. ‘More than that. I’m starting to think you don’t have the first  idea what you’re doing here. I think you’re pretty much screaming out for someone to help you. Which I didn’t know, and which is pretty sad.’</p><p>‘Destiny,’ he says, vaguely, but Luke just smiles, a little half-smile.</p><p>‘Get some sleep,’ he tells him. ‘You’re not going to remember any of this anyway. It’ll be back to the same old shit tomorrow, no doubt.’</p><p>Ben stretches, aware of how tired he is.</p><p>‘Probably. I think I will sleep.’</p><p>It’s all fine. He’s still the supreme leader. Later, he'll go out and be Kylo Ren, just like Luke says.<br/><br/>Everything in good time.</p><p> </p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0004"><h2>4. Chapter 4</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p> </p><p> He wakes up after a long night’s sleep and his wrist doesn’t hurt, which makes him feel strange. He’s slept heavily but not well. The medication’s left him feeling dehydrated and slightly confused. It’s mostly the lack of pain. In the space where it used to be, there’s just nothing.</p><p>It makes him feel weightless. He showers, trying to re-orientate himself. What happened? He was talking to Luke, but he can’t remember a lot about it. Something about Rey. Training her. He’d been floating.        </p><p>In training, he finds that it’s easier. Of course, it’s to be expected. He just hadn’t factored in exactly <em>how much</em> easier it would be. He moves to fight, and finds that instinctively, he operates differently. He balances his weight much more evenly. The Force is much more natural. He can sense – not easily, but with feels like fewer restrictions than before.</p><p>Luke seems cheerful too, although he offers no comment on it.</p><p>‘Looks good,’ he says, simply. ‘No wonder you were in such a mess before.’</p><p>Ben finishes a difficult form, lets his mind clear to a single point of being. He inhabits the Force, lets it take him over, just briefly.</p><p>‘I wasn’t in a mess,’ he says, although he knows the hostility in his voice isn’t as much as it should be.</p><p>‘All right,’ Luke says. ‘You weren’t. But whatever it was, it’s clearly better now.’</p><p><br/>+<br/><br/></p><p>The next time he’s with Rey, he sees her mid-fight. He can’t see her opponents, but he can see her.</p><p>‘Ben,’ she says, almost hissing, sensing him. ‘Not the best time.’</p><p>Her saber’s raised, swirling, dangerous.</p><p>‘Who are you fighting?’ He steps back to watch, seeing how she does it.</p><p>‘Some of your friends.’ A wave of her hand. He supposes that’s someone going flying. ‘First Order goons.’</p><p>‘How many?’</p><p>‘Fifteen or so.’ She takes a defensive stance.</p><p>‘Alone?’</p><p>‘Yes, very much alone.’ She sighs. Moves forward, presumably on the attack again. ‘Apart from you, I guess. So they now think I’m a Jedi bitch <em>and</em> I’m crazy for talking to myself.’</p><p>‘I see.’ He observes, dispassionate. ‘Sweep them all with the Force. You don’t have to do it one by one if they’re that weak.’</p><p>‘Don’t know how.’</p><p>‘Give me your hand,’ he suggests. ‘The non-saber one. I’ll show you.’</p><p>She acquiesces. He does it, moving through her. He’s not sure it’ll work, since he’s not really there, but the connection between him and Rey is strong enough that she gets it. He can feel it, her power and his. They blend like they’re meant to be together. She sweeps with her hand, and there’s a noise. A sensation of real, tremendous power. Even for him it’s electric, so he can only imagine what it’s like for her.</p><p>‘Oh,’ she says, breathing hard. ‘That worked.’</p><p>She lets go of his hand. Turns to face him. She’s sweating. Her hair has come loose.</p><p>‘Thanks.’</p><p>He shrugs. ‘I wanted to talk to you. Couldn’t do that while you were distracted.’</p><p>‘What did you want to talk to me about?’</p><p>‘I’d like to train you,’ he says. ‘Not as a Sith. Not as a Jedi. Just in the practical things you need to know.’</p><p>She pauses. Looks at him for a long time.</p><p>‘Yes,’ she says, finally. ‘But why?’</p><p>‘Does it matter why?’</p><p>‘A bit.’ She half-smiles. ‘If it’s all in the pursuit of converting me to the Dark Side, I’d have to refuse. If it’s all about finding out where the Resistance is, I’d have to refuse.’</p><p>‘I just said it wasn’t that.’</p><p>‘Yeah, but you’ve got to forgive me if I’m a bit suspicious.’ She gestures. ‘Swirling cloak, blood-red saber. Supreme Leader of the First Order. You know.’</p><p>‘I just don’t think it’s right,’ Ben says, which is sort of true, although not well-articulated. ‘That you’re so powerful but you don’t know how to use it. It annoys me.’</p><p>She laughs, just a single brief laugh.</p><p>‘You’re going to train me because my incompetence annoys you.’</p><p>‘Yes.’</p><p>‘Fine, then.’ She stretches, and he can sense that she’s in pain, mild but present. Before he got here, she must have been fighting for a longer time. ‘But the Force doesn’t connect us often.’</p><p>‘It will now,’ Ben tells her.</p><p>He’s sure about that. He can feel the rightness of the situation, a sense of the absolute inevitability of all of the parts of the story coalescing to this point. Luke, him, Rey, Snoke. It all leads here: to him training her. He doesn’t know why and it doesn’t really matter.</p><p> </p><p>+</p><p> </p><p>He tells Luke about this.</p><p> ‘And you’ll be training her as what, exactly?’ Luke asks, carefully. It’s late at night, and Ben’s about to sleep.</p><p>‘I don’t know. I’ll show her things she needs.’</p><p>‘But –‘ His uncle doesn’t finish that sentence either. There are a lot of sentences he doesn’t finish. ‘So, what sort of plan do you have for that?’</p><p>‘I want to show her the practicalities. How to better use the Force.’</p><p>Luke hmms. ‘If it were me, which of course it isn’t, I wouldn’t focus too much on her saber-work, for sure. She’s already good. That comes naturally.’</p><p>‘Right.’</p><p>‘But she’s got weaknesses. Her parents, for one. Vulnerability. She feels alone. That makes her… a risk. It makes her prey.’</p><p>‘I know.’</p><p>‘You need to train her to withstand someone who’ll use that to hurt her.’</p><p>‘There isn’t anyone.’</p><p>‘No, you sure as fuck saw to that. Congratulations on exterminating everyone except yourself and her.’ Luke sighs. ‘Sorry. I find these conversations difficult.’</p><p>He doesn’t answer that; just waits.</p><p>‘Anyway, there’ll be someone else eventually,’ his uncle tells him. ‘There always is.’</p><p>‘I’ll kill them too.’</p><p>‘Sure,’ Luke says, not sounding very interested in this. ‘But my concern is, let’s say you don’t manage to kill them <em>immediately</em>. They, whoever they might be, will find Rey. They may persuade her to – to do things she doesn’t really want. She’s vulnerable to that.’</p><p>‘You want me to train her to resist persuasion.’</p><p>‘Yes.’</p><p>‘But what if I’m the one who’s persuading her?’ Ben stretches. ‘What if I’m the one making her do things she doesn’t really want to do.’</p><p>‘Then it’s going to be a pretty weird and awkward set-up,’ Luke says. ‘But you should train her to resist anyway. Even if the person she resists ends up being you.’</p><p>His uncle takes another breath.</p><p>‘And don’t saber me through,’ he adds, ‘but for what it’s worth, I don’t think it’ll be you doing it. It strikes me as unlikely.’</p><p> </p><p>+</p><p>He meets Rey in their dreams more often than in life. He sleeps longer, which leads to more dreams. More space for her to occupy. Often she is there, dressed in her customary white, saber in hand.</p><p>He trains her, just like he’d promised he would. You could call it practicalities, what he’s teaching her. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it’s Jedi forms, the things he learned from Luke, so long ago.</p><p>She moves with him.</p><p>‘It’s beautiful,’ she says, as he moves her the opening form, the thing he stopped practising but still remembers. She gets it like it’s her birth right. ‘It makes me feel clear. Like you could see right through me.’</p><p>‘It’s supposed to feel like that.’</p><p>She’s very close to him. Her hands are on his skin.</p><p>‘Show me again.’</p><p>He does, of course. It takes hours or takes minutes or seconds. Dreams have no time except their own.</p><p><br/>+</p><p>‘Going well?’ Luke asks, when Ben’s woken up. ‘Training Rey in your dreams, I mean.’</p><p>Ben shrugs. ‘Fairly. I taught her the opening form.’</p><p>Luke blinks rather rapidly. He looks as if he’s about to say something, but represses it.</p><p>‘Did she like it?’</p><p>‘Yeah. I have teach her them all, but I don’t remember them.’</p><p>‘I can show you that,’ Luke says, sounding calm. ‘I think you’d remember them if you saw them.’</p><p>‘Probably.’</p><p>‘Shall we start with that, then?’ Luke suggests. ‘If you want.’</p><p>Does he want? In some way, not at all. In another way though, it’s practically inevitable. And anyway, they’re only stretches. Rituals. They’re not real things. Knowing how to do them doesn’t make him a Jedi.</p><p>‘Sure,’ he says. ‘Why not?’</p><p><br/>+</p><p> </p><p>He does try to tell Rey about persuasion, but it ends up different to how he’d hoped. Mostly because he begins by saying, ‘People might try to get inside your mind.’</p><p>‘You did that,’ she says, and her tone’s all at once cold. She’s remembering it. The way he tried to prise her open like a nut. Pushing into her thoughts; going to the places he wasn’t allowed to go. The memory’s a bad one for her. Even now, he can sense her fear of him. This was the wrong topic to pursue.</p><p>‘Yes. But others might too.’</p><p>‘Like who?’</p><p>‘Someone new. Someone we don’t know yet.’</p><p>‘I fought you off.’</p><p>‘Yeah, but I…’ He pauses, unsure. ‘Even then, I didn’t want to hurt you. Not that much. Not to break your mind.’</p><p>‘Just to violate it.’</p><p>‘Yes.’</p><p>‘Ben,’ she says, and her tone’s edged. ‘This thing between us is nice, but I don’t understand what you really want from me.’</p><p>‘I don’t know either,’ he says, which is honest, but perhaps unsettling to her, because she flinches. ‘I just have to do it.’</p><p>‘But <em>why</em>?’ She shakes her head. ‘You’re teaching me things that are useful. I need them. But you – the things you’ve done. The person you are… you –‘ she takes a pause. ‘You killed him. And that might not even be the worst thing you’ve done.’</p><p>He doesn’t say anything; there’s nothing he can say.</p><p>‘You seem different,’ she tells him. ‘There’s some other thing in you than just that monster. But I can’t ever be sure of who you are.’</p><p>‘I had a broken wrist,’ he answers, not really responding to her point, but also not entirely avoiding it ‘And a damaged shoulder. And some other… problems, which I’d had for a long time. I recently found that they were fixable.’</p><p>‘What’s that got to do with it?’</p><p>‘Nothing, not exactly. It’s just possible that things are more fixable than I thought. In general, I mean.’</p><p>She doesn’t understand what he’s saying; he can see that in her face.</p><p>‘If someone starts whispering things inside your head,’ he tells her, trying again. ‘You should let me know.’</p><p>She just nods, but he senses doubt. In no time at all, they’ll both wake up. As he wakes, he’s still thinking about it. The way she looked at him. The fear in her eyes. At least with himself, he can sometimes be honest.</p><p>He didn’t like that fear. Not one bit.</p><p>+</p><p> </p><p>‘I find it hard to train her,’ he ventures to Luke, some days later as he’s still thinking about it, ‘in the things you first suggested.’</p><p>‘Why’s that?’ Luke scarcely looks over.</p><p>‘I don’t –  fully understand it myself. Not every aspect.’</p><p>This gets a full look from his uncle. As full as it gets anyway, to say that he’s a ghost. To say that he has no specific corporeal form.</p><p>‘Something you don’t understand?’</p><p>‘I don’t want to discuss it in detail,’ Ben tells him curtly, ‘but my only experience of persuasion is through the way Snoke first communicated to me.’</p><p>‘Ah. That was a long time ago.’</p><p>‘Yes. I have a limited ability to explain to Rey based on that.’</p><p>‘Well…’ Luke seems to be edging so carefully, and it annoys Ben.</p><p>‘You don’t have to be so fucking cautious all the time, Luke,’ he tells him.</p><p>‘Is that what you think?’ His uncle pauses. ‘You’re right I’m cautious. There are some conversations that I’m not sure it’s possible to have.’</p><p>‘Like, <em>why the fuck did you listen to Snoke</em>?’</p><p>‘Yeah.’ Luke smiles. ‘Like why  the fuck did you listen to Snoke. Although that’s not the most urgent conversation we’re not having, is it? There are more pressing things to say.’</p><p>Ben feels irritability, tension, coursing through him. An urge to hurt, rising up. It’s been a while since he felt it, that pent-up rage.</p><p>‘See? You’re not ready,’ Luke says, and he’s very calm. ‘Just thinking about thinking about it makes you feel like you’re going to split the galaxy in two with your fist.’</p><p>‘I’m fine.’</p><p>‘And look,’ Luke adds, ignoring this. ‘If you want to train Rey, you don’t need to have it all clear in your head anyway. Just tell her what happened in a factual way, and decide together what she could do if it happened to her. I don’t see why you need to put labels on it.’</p><p>‘I don’t know what she could do.’</p><p>‘Well, usually you’ve got three options, I’d say,’ Luke tells him. ‘Either agree to the persuasion and go do whatever the person wants you to do, fight it off and tell the person to go to hell, or ignore it and keep listening to try to understand it.’</p><p>‘And,’ his uncle sighs, ‘my personal experience is that most people who try the third option end up in a dangerous situation.’</p><p>Ben look at him.</p><p>‘If someone’s in your head, they’re stronger than you,’ Luke says, very lightly. ‘The fact they’re in there at all means that their power’s more developed than yours. If you don’t try to push them out, or agree to their demands, they won’t go anywhere. It’s not in their interest to leave.’</p><p>‘You might learn from them,’ Ben says, tightly, because the conversation’s still too close to what he doesn’t want.</p><p>‘Yeah, you might. But you might also find that their persuasion intensifies. And their power over you grows with each time they talk to you. It’s like planting seeds.’ Luke sighs. ‘Every new conversation is a new seed. And sooner or later, if you do nothing, you’re going to get a garden of weeds. A garden of snares.’</p><p>‘Your connection to them grows,’ Ben corrects, thinking about it. ‘I’d say it more that way.’</p><p>‘Yes, but if the person is someone you don’t want a connection to, or someone who might exploit the connection, which let’s face it Ben, is pretty much the essence of being a Sith, then what you get is a problem.’</p><p>There’s a pause.</p><p>‘You think I’m a Sith,’ Ben says, or asks, he isn’t so sure. Luke sighs.</p><p>‘I think you’re just yourself, kid. I wouldn’t like to put a name on it. And what does it matter what I think anyway? I’m dead.’</p><p>Their conversation ends there, but it carries on in Ben’s head.</p><p> </p><p>+</p><p> </p><p>He kills someone on Uthnad. There’ve been rumours of a base there. Sightings of a woman matching Leia’s description. Ben already knows it isn’t her, but he goes anyway, more to placate the generals than for anything else.</p><p>If it were Leia, he’d have sensed it the second he landed. All he feels here is low-level resistance. It’s a thuggish, low-rent kind of planet. Not a lot of money; not a lot of hope. Plenty of black market trading out in the swamps.</p><p>He moves quickly and quietly, working alone. Flies into the remote place where the whispers end. It’s an encampment, three or four structures built on a sort of concrete platform, surrounded by morass. Ferns, ancient-looking vegetation.</p><p>Edrin’s in his mind. This has <em>trap</em> written on it. It has <em>get your enemies to a remote location and kill them</em> written on it, in a bright neon pen. Is he really going to go there, knock on doors, and discover what he already knows, which is that his mother isn’t here and never has been?</p><p>Probably he is. His feet land soft on the wet earth. Behind him, Luke’s incorporeal form just sighs.</p><p>‘Trap, Ben,’ he says, not bothering to extend the sentence.</p><p>‘I know. No choice.’</p><p>He moves forward, using the Force to jump the final stretch, to land on the concrete platform. He lands so quietly that nothing stirs. There’s no one here, not that he can see. Nothing detonates either, which he takes as a good sign.</p><p>He senses around him. What is there here? Empty storerooms. A feeling of … he can’t quite place it. Criminality. Dark intent, but not his kind of dark. Smuggling, maybe. Underhandedness. The sort of petty malice that falls below the radar. And, somewhere beyond that, there’s a lifeform. Hiding, perhaps even scared.</p><p>He moves towards it, as he must. The door cracks open at a wave of his hands. The fake wall too comes down as if it had never been there at all, and behind it, from beyond it, somewhere in the dark stone corridor, comes the noise. A gasp, or a jolt of shock.</p><p>‘Don’t,’ Luke says, but Ben’s already raising his saber. He’s purposeful, listening closely to the noise. Takes a few steps into the corridor. Follows it down, and there – sure enough – at its small, cavernous end, is what must be a man, small and squat.</p><p>His hands are raised in a defensive posture.</p><p>‘No trouble,’ he says, which strikes Ben as unlikely. <br/><br/>‘Trouble,’ he tells him in return, keeping his voice cold. He isn’t wearing his mask, but he doesn’t need it to threaten. ‘The resistance were here.’</p><p>‘Never seen them. Nothing to do with them.’</p><p>‘Don’t waste my time,’ Ben tells him, which is already the kindest he’s been in about seven years to an enemy. He gathers the Force and pins the guy to the back wall, holding him. He squirms, as they always do. ‘You’re lying.’</p><p>‘You can use the Force,’ the man says, sounding terrified. ‘That’s what this is. Like the other. The little girl. She could do this too.’</p><p>Has Rey been pinning people to walls with the Force lately? Ben wasn’t aware of that. He makes a note to ask her about it.</p><p>‘You’ve seen Rey, then. One of the leaders of the Resistance.’ He shakes the man, so that he’s pulled up and down, against his will, thudding into the wall. ‘Tell me again how you don’t know anything about them.’</p><p>‘She came here looking for something.’ He snivels, trying to stand up straight. ‘The sword thing. Glowing, like what you got.’</p><p>‘A saber?’</p><p>‘Yeah, lightsaber. Sold it already. Gone.’ He shudders. ‘Nothing to do with me. Sold it a year ago.’</p><p>He’s lying. The Force makes that so pathetically obvious that Ben can have no doubt at all. He moves his hand, tightening the air around the man’s throat. Luke winces; he can feel it. The man is gasping for air. Darkness, gathering around him. Black hatred. Contempt.</p><p>‘Less bullshit.’</p><p>He releases his hold, and the man wheezes, stooping, clutching at his throat.</p><p>‘Okay,’ he gasps. ‘Not sold. Waiting to sell. But you can have it. You can buy it, or –‘ He gasps again. ‘Have it for free. Happy to give it you. Anything to – to keep a –‘</p><p>‘To keep your life,’ Ben says, bored with this. He throws the man down to the ground, releasing him entirely. He crawls to a standing position, still looking terrified and craven.</p><p>‘Bring it to me.’</p><p>The man nods, and moves a few steps towards Ben. There’s treachery in this, he can sense that. Another step. Closer now. His saber’s drawn. He’s watching him, the Force steady around him. Another step and then a violent, rapid movement towards Ben. The man withdrawing something from his pocket, something glinting and bright, humming. Before he can even draw it, Ben’s thrown him hard against the wall of the cave. Very, very hard. There’s a scream, and then a thump. The sound of bones breaking. The saber spins, and he catches it, activated and bright in his other hand.</p><p>The man is dead. Ben moves over to look at him. He’s broken his neck, he sees. Smashed his head. Unfortunate, but that’s the way of the things. His eyes are glassy and wide, like any other body.</p><p>Worse, perhaps, than other bodies, because this time he feels something. Looking at the corpse, he feels a strange sensation. It isn’t grief or regret, nothing so strong as that. It’s more like a sense of …  doubt. Greyness. A feeling, even, of a certain weariness at the way this has gone; the fact that it’s another day involving death.</p><p>Behind him, Luke’s hovering, of course. Ben turns to him.</p><p>‘Accident,’ he says, to forestall his uncle’s comments. ‘In this case not my intention.’</p><p>‘Throwing people at a wall at full strength tends to kill them,’ Luke says, sounding strained. ‘If the strength is yours. Not exactly an accident.’</p><p>‘He was nothing; just some scum dirt trader,’ Ben says, although he is himself, if he pauses to reflect on it, not feeling the absolute greatest he’s ever felt.</p><p>Luke just looks at him, clearly unwilling to comment on this but not without an opinion.</p><p>‘Not a Jedi,’ Ben says, irritably. ‘Not a good person. Not my problem.’</p><p>He looks at the saber, the one the man was storing. It’s not one he recognises, which is unusual. There aren’t that many of them, after all. Its light is green, almost emerald. To touch, it doesn’t feel like much.</p><p>‘You know this one?’ he asks Luke, but he shakes his head.</p><p>‘Never seen it.’</p><p>Ben deactivates it and puts it in his pocket. Begins to walk away from the cave, out towards the concrete strip and the swamp beyond. He’s done here. This was all nothing. Rey came here looking for a saber. People got rumours of a Resistance base because she probably ran around dressed in shining Jedi white and got everyone suspicious that it was more than it was. There’s no story here, other than what this loser was doing with a saber in the first place, and Ben doesn’t care much about that.</p><p>At the end of the small corridor, he turns back, although he doesn’t know why. Looks at the body, still visible, its head at an awkward angle, facing towards the wall. There’s blood pooling.</p><p>‘It wasn’t what I wanted,’ Ben says, although he knows that he doesn’t have to. ‘It’s just bad luck.’</p><p>‘Mmh,’ Luke says, but he doesn’t go further, so there’s nothing to argue with. They leave the place and Ben doesn’t look back again.</p><p> </p><p><br/>+</p><p> </p><p>He asks Rey, of course, about the saber. She’s still wary, after their last conversation, but she responds to it.</p><p>‘He didn’t give it to me,’ she says. She’s practising using the Force to lift something very large, which is an easy trick for Ben, but which doesn’t seem to be so easy for her.</p><p>‘He gave it to me.’</p><p>‘You’re obviously more persuasive than I am.’ She shakes her head, obviously not able to do what she wants. ‘I’m not getting this, sorry.’</p><p>‘There’s no difference between lifting a rock and lifting a ship. It’s only harder if you believe that it is.’</p><p>‘So you say. To me it seems pretty different.’</p><p>‘Why did you want the saber anyway?’</p><p>She turns, looking at him. ‘I want one that’s mine.’</p><p>‘You already have one.’</p><p>‘Yeah, and it’s not mine, not really. I can feel that it belongs…’ She breaks off, falling into silence. ‘It just doesn’t feel like mine.’</p><p>‘You can feel that it belongs to me,’ he says, although he isn’t particularly angry about it these days; not as much as he used to be. ‘Via Luke, via Anakin.’</p><p>‘It belongs to Ben Solo.’</p><p>‘That is me,’ he says, not even thinking about it.</p><p>There’s an ominous pause. Shit, he thinks. The stuff with Luke is frying his brain. He’s getting tangled in all sorts of problems.</p><p>‘Um,’ Rey says, and she actually turns, full turns, to stare at him. The expression on her face is one of bewildered hope.</p><p>‘In an abstract way,’ he adds, although he knows it’s a stupid comment. ‘That was me.’</p><p>‘It’s still you.’ She smiles then, taking a step closer to him. For the first time since their argument, he can sense welcome in her. ‘Although apparently you can only admit that if it revolves around Ben Solo getting something he wants.’</p><p>‘It does belong to me,’ he says. ‘As Kylo Ren, or as Ben Solo. It’s my family’s. That’s the point.’</p><p>‘Switch then,’ Rey suggests. Her tone is light, almost teasing. ‘Give me the one you got from that guy. I’ll give you the <em>Skywalker lightsaber.</em>’</p><p>‘Switch?’</p><p>‘Sure. I don’t like this one.’ She shrugs. ‘I know it’s powerful, but lately, I’ve started to have this feeling whenever I use it, like it wants to get back to… well, to you. To Ben Solo. It’s distracting, to keep thinking about you when I’m fighting.’</p><p>She sheathes it, and reaches out her hand to him, for him to take it. Through a projection, it’s difficult but not impossible. He’ll be able to do it. And the saber does call to him. He wants it badly; he can feel a sense of draw towards it, an urge. The emerald saber is still in his pocket. He takes it out.</p><p>‘Are you sure?’ he asks her, although Kylo Ren wouldn’t ask that.</p><p>She nods.</p><p>‘It’s yours anyway, Ben. And the one you’re holding, it’s calling to me.’</p><p>They exchange. As he takes it, a shadow passes through him. Old memories, he guesses. Things that belong to Luke, or to Anakin. Not bad things. It feels like his.</p><p><br/>+</p><p> </p><p>He sleeps well now. Sometimes through the night, and always at least for more than a few hours at a time. He dreams about Rey, and he often dreams about other things too. It seems to leave him feeling less fractured when he wakes up. He has a general sense of improved well-being.</p><p>As he eats, he occasionally talks to Luke. His uncle seems generally willing to converse, if a rather neutral sort of conversational partner at times.</p><p>‘Meeting,’ he tells him, when Luke asks what the plan is.</p><p> ‘So, what’s on the agenda for today?’</p><p>‘We’re selecting the weaponry for the new ships,’ Ben says. ‘Strategy meeting. Hux is thinking about chemical weaponry alongside standard fire. Would be efficient on low-lying planets if we chem-bombed as standard.’</p><p>‘Hmm,’ Luke says.</p><p>‘Don’t.’</p><p>‘Kid, I’m not saying a word.’</p><p>‘You don’t have to. I know what your hmm means.’</p><p>‘Do what you think best,’ Luke says. Ben can sense his thoughts, to some degree. He’s thinking about that stupid guy, the one he accidentally killed a couple of days before. ‘If it’s efficient strategy to use chem-bombs, and efficiency is your goal…’</p><p>‘I’ll do as I see fit.’</p><p>‘I don’t doubt it,’ his uncle says. ‘You’ve been doing as you see fit since you were three years old and you force levitated into the top cupboard so you could get the stuff you wanted.’</p><p>‘I didn’t do that,’ Ben says, surprised. ‘Did I?’</p><p>‘Sure. I had to levitate you down,’ Luke says. ‘You were looking for something sweet, I guess. You force climbed like a spider monkey.’</p><p>‘I don’t remember. Was I severely punished?’</p><p>‘We loved you more than anyone in the galaxy,’ Luke says, light voice. ‘You were a little kid. You don’t severely punish people you love for that kind of thing. We just started putting stuff in other cupboards and let you levitate something else instead that was safer.’</p><p>‘Oh,’ Ben says.</p><p>He feels that thing again. The inconvenient sense of greyness.</p><p>He does go to the meeting about the weaponry, but in the end, he doesn’t vote for the chem-bombs. It just doesn’t seem very elegant, somehow. He’s not in the mood for a change like that.</p><p>In the corner, as always, Luke is there – a silent, radiating presence.</p><p> </p><p>+</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> ‘Decided against the bombing, huh?’ Luke says, in training later. He’s helping Ben to strengthen his wrist, putting increments of pressure on it, flexing it.</p><p>‘I think standard fire is adequate.’</p><p>‘Right,’ Luke says. He looks as if he might be quirking a smile, but he’s keeping it just about hidden.</p><p>‘It doesn’t change anything,’ Ben says. He pushes his wrist slightly too hard, and it aches suddenly, a sharp gnawing feeling.</p><p>‘I know,’ Luke says. ‘You’re the supreme leader. You don’t have to explain your decisions to me.’</p><p>‘I just don’t think we need to presume that annihilation is necessary in every case.’</p><p>‘Not in every case,’ Luke says. ‘All right. Can you flex a bit to the side there?’</p><p>He knows that his uncle thinks he’s turning. Of course he knows that. Well, let him believe that if he like. The decision was strategic, and once he’s fully returned to form, he’ll find a way to exorcise Luke.</p><p>+</p><p> </p><p>Sometimes, he still gets really angry. It’s less than before, but it does still happen.</p><p>Like when Hux tells him that he hasn’t competently led the latest campaign. There’s a scene that ends up with broken tables and chairs. Screaming. Scattered generals and hangers-on. He hates that. Hux is still talking about the chem-bombing, the necessity of it, the functionality of it. He’s already said no. It’s insubordination to disagree.</p><p>In training he would have usually started throwing stuff around with the Force, letting swords slide into his enemies, running off his excess energy, smashing and burning. Mutilation, but there’s no way he’s doing that now. Not in these circumstances.</p><p>‘I’m angry,’ he tells Luke, who can probably sense that anyway. ‘Need to –‘</p><p>He thinks about what he actually needs. There is something he needs, and that’s linked to the other saber, the one that Rey gave to him. He can feel that, so he draws it now, letting its white, bright light flood the windowless room. Luke blinks.</p><p>‘Oh,’ he says.</p><p>‘Rey gave it to me.’ Ben raises it, preparing. The other one, the red one, is sheathed. He’ll keep them both.</p><p>The droids activate, on kill mode, and all seven of them. Not a difficult challenge. Ben closes his eyes. More difficult. He can sense all of them. The saber hums with purpose.</p><p>He channels it all into moving faster, sharper, and cleaner.</p><p>‘Great,’ Luke says, soothingly at the side. ‘Good focus.’</p><p>He moves so fast he feels that he’s a blur of motion. The force lets him lift up, stronger, welcomes him, lets him move freely.</p><p>‘Very neat,’ Luke says, and it’s just like being back at Temple before everything got so….</p><p>He cuts through the droid very, very cleanly.</p><p>‘Fine,’ Luke says. ‘Pull the others towards you.’</p><p>He does it, and they charge at him, tumbling towards him. It’s tough, keeping balance against them, but on the other hand, he is Ben Solo, he has the right fucking lightsaber for the first time <em>ever</em>, it’s well within his limits, and now his wrist works properly, it’s actually quite a lot easier too -</p><p>‘Hard cut,’ Luke says. Ben cuts hard.</p><p>‘Excellent,’ Luke says. It <em>is </em>excellent. He knows that. He is absolutely performing this task excellently.</p><p>The droids fall so smoothly. He’s angry, and he’s in control. He opens his eyes. Breathes in deeply.</p><p>‘Good,’ Luke concludes. ‘Much better than throwing stuff around like a maniac. Much more useful than torturing them. Can you put that focus into your work more often? I’ve missed it.’</p><p>‘I’ve always been focused,’ he says. He’s breathing hard. It was still tough.</p><p>‘Sure,’ Luke says. He never seems to want to argue these days. He just lets Ben get on with being himself. ‘And nice saber, by the way.’</p><p> </p><p>
  <span class="u">+</span>
</p><p> </p><p>He is still the supreme leader, of course. He meets Hux, commands, orders, threatens, cajoles, liaises, and does all kinds of things that are hateful, frightening, and dark. He doesn’t do them <em>himself</em>. He just lets them happen. He’s aware that they’re happening, and he is nominally the person who controls them. He uses the red saber, and he sometimes wears his mask.</p><p>It’s just that he has this other part of his life, temporarily, in which he’s training with Luke Skywalker and he’s Ben Solo.</p><p>It doesn’t mean anything. It’s only ultimately helping him to become the person he was meant to be. He’s using Luke to get stronger. That’s all this.</p><p> </p><p>+<br/><br/></p><p>One morning, he opens their training with bowing to Luke, completely automatic as if he were still his Padawan. Luke blinks.</p><p>‘Huh,’ he says.</p><p>Ben catches himself. ‘Sorry,’ he says. ‘Force of habit.’</p><p>‘You don’t have to bow,’ Luke says. ‘I’m not your master.’</p><p>'No,' he agrees. 'I just... it's familiar. I got used to it.'</p><p>Luke smiles, and it's very kind. Not mocking. Just kind. 'So you haven't forgotten everything you learned.’</p><p>'No,' he says. 'I didn't forget that much. I just didn't want to use it.'</p><p>'Okay,' Luke says. 'You feel like remembering some more stuff?'</p><p>'Like?'</p><p>'Let's levitate some stuff,' he says.</p><p>'Really?' His face is quizzical. 'I'm not nine. I'm not five.'</p><p>'No, but you know what? Isn't it just kind of fun?'</p><p>'What?'</p><p>'Fun,' Luke repeats. 'Making stuff float.'</p><p>'I don't know.'</p><p>'I miss it,' he says. 'I can't do anything. I can only watch you. If you wouldn't mind, I'd like to watch some things floating in mid-air.'</p><p>'Well, fine...'<br/><br/>He lifts up a few random objects. They sit there, floating calmly.</p><p>'Is that really as much as you can do?'</p><p>'No,' he says. He lifts up a couple more, a training rack, a droid that's deactivated. It is actually quite fun, he thinks. In some odd way.</p><p>'Can you spin them around?' Luke asks.</p><p>'I suppose...'</p><p>He does it, setting them all off twirling beautifully.</p><p>His hand moves through the form so easily. He can really do anything he chooses. He dips the training droid low, as if it were dancing, or fighting. Lets it spin.</p><p>'Nice,' Luke says, and he does seem to be enjoying it.</p><p>Ben realises he's enjoying it too. It's just some stupid thing.</p><p>He moves a saber around then, letting it spin in midair, rising and falling, round and round, its blade glistening bright. He smiles.</p><p>'I wish we'd had more fun,' Luke says. 'I wish I'd had more fun.'</p><p>‘Some stuff was fun,’ Ben says. ‘The … s’ratha, the echo.’</p><p>Luke laughs, and it’s a sound that Ben hasn’t heard for years.</p><p>‘I shouldn’t have taught you that,’ he says. ‘Not when you were that age.’</p><p>‘Well,’ Ben says. He lets the saber fall neatly back into his hand, sets the droids down. ‘I really liked it.’</p><p> ‘But you never do it now.’</p><p>‘Why would I do it now? It’s just a silly trick.’</p><p>‘Why not?’</p><p>‘I don’t think I remember how.’</p><p>‘Lucky you’ve got a teacher then.’</p><p>‘Seriously?’</p><p>Luke just shrugs. ‘I’m dead. I don’t care that much.’</p><p>‘Okay,’ Ben says. Why not, after all?<br/><br/>He claps his hands, and lets the Force echo through the sound vibration, sends it spinning outwards – and hears a resounding clap back from several nearby objects, including two swords that clap together in a rather ominous way, spearing at each other. One of them ends up spinning forward in mid-flight, almost landing on him.</p><p>‘Oops,’ he says, dodging it. ‘I forgot it did that with swords.’</p><p>Luke laughs.</p><p>He lifts the swords back casually, so they slot neatly into place. Clicks his fingers, curious what will click back at him.</p><p>One of the training droids clicks its own fingers, as if in harmony.</p><p>He laughs, unexpectedly amused. Clicks his fingers back at it, in a fast rhythm. The droid clicks back like it’s about to launch into a musical performance. He smiles, and it’s quite weird, because he doesn’t actually <em>smile</em> that much. It’s not one of his things.</p><p>It feels quite nice.</p><p>Luke’s smiling too. ‘You’re much more restrained with it than you were when you were seven,’ he says.</p><p>‘Was it awful?’</p><p>‘Yeah,’ Luke says. ‘I don’t know what I was thinking. You echoed everything. I never want to hear some of those sounds again.’</p><p>‘I don’t remember it that well. Just that it was fun.’</p><p>Luke’s still smiling, lost in the memory. ‘Your parents nearly went mad. Han told me I’d ruined his life.’</p><p>With a resounding thud, the dummy falls down, its fingers spread-eagled skyward. Ben doesn’t even look at Luke. He just walks out of the training room and straight into being Kylo Ren as fast as possible.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0005"><h2>5. Chapter 5</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>He wakes up that night in absolute terror. It’s been a while since he’s had one of those dreams.</p><p>‘I’m here,’ Luke says. He’s already moving towards him. ‘Sit up, kiddo. C’mon.’</p><p>He does sit up, gasping for air.</p><p>‘It’s over now,’ Luke says. ‘All over. Don’t worry, just a stupid dream. Just your brain’s output of random nonsense.’</p><p>‘Not,’ Ben says, still gasping slightly. ‘Real. Totally real.’</p><p>‘Hey now,’ Luke says, and his voice is just as kind as it used to be when Ben was a little kid. ‘I’ve been here the whole time. You were just asleep and dreaming.’</p><p>‘Snoke,’ he says. ‘I – I can’t – I can’t breathe. I can’t, Uncle, I can’t -’</p><p>He begins, rapidly, to hyperventilate. He’s had this before too.</p><p>‘Shush,’ Luke says. ‘Just take the air you need. There’s a lot of it there for you, whenever you’re ready.’</p><p>‘I can’t, can’t –‘</p><p>‘Sure you can,’ Luke says. ‘You can do anything you want. Just breathe a bit of air in. It’ll help.’</p><p>He manages, just, to breathe in. It does help.</p><p>‘You’re doing so well,’ Luke says. ‘Deep outbreath.’</p><p>‘Snoke,’ Ben manages to gasp out. ‘Alive, still alive. Have to -’</p><p>‘No way.’ Luke sounds so reassuringly solid, even if he is a ghost.  ‘That old weirdo’s as dead as dead. From what I heard, you cut him in half with a lightsaber. There’s not much coming back from that.’</p><p>‘No, I have to –‘</p><p>‘Keep breathing,’ Luke says. He puts what would be an arm around Ben’s shoulders, and he can almost feel it – some sort of ghostly touch, not warmth – certainly not that – but also not cold. Not unkindness.</p><p>‘That’s right,’ he says. ‘You’re doing it all just right. Keep breathing like you are. We’ve got all the time.’</p><p>He is starting to feel more normal. His heart is still racing, his skin sick with sweat, but he can breathe. He’s steadying a bit, but he’s still on edge. His uncle’s arm is around him, but it’s not warm, it can’t be, because he’s –</p><p> ‘You’re okay,’ Luke says to him. ‘Come on, you’re okay. Shush now. All okay.’</p><p>‘Uncle,’ he says.</p><p>They don’t talk any more after that. Ben just lies there, his breathing evening out, until he eventually falls asleep. As he sleeps, he feels like he’s surrounded by light, encasing him in a protective bubble. He sleeps pretty well.</p><p> </p><p>+</p><p> </p><p>The next morning, they don’t talk about it. He just goes to work, as usual, managing the campaign, with that ghostly energy floating dimly in the corner.</p><p>And during training, Luke doesn’t even comment on it. He just does what he always does, which is to watch and comment on missteps.</p><p>‘You’re getting so much better,’ he says. ‘You’ve stopped making all those stupid mistakes. I’d say,’ and then he smiles, ‘You're almost as good as when you were eleven.’</p><p>Ben doesn’t even bother to feel angry about it.</p><p>‘I wasn’t as strong when I was eleven.’</p><p>‘No,’ Luke says. ‘But you were better trained.’</p><p>‘Maybe.’ Ben throws a saber, and his wrist doesn’t even twinge. ‘I think two years working alone wasn’t necessarily that helpful.’</p><p>‘Seven years here wasn’t necessarily that helpful,’ Luke says, but he doesn’t sound angry, so Ben doesn’t have anything to respond to. ‘How’s your wrist?’</p><p>‘Fine, I think.’</p><p>‘Ben…’ his uncle’s voice trails off as if he is about to say something bad. ‘Why didn’t you fix it straight away? Why didn’t you have proper treatment?’</p><p>‘It wasn’t that easy to treat.’</p><p>‘But it should have been,’ Luke says. ‘If someone breaks a bone in training, okay. It happens. I’m not asking, I’m not even going to ask you a single thing about why you <em>let </em>someone do it to you. If that’s the way you like being taught, that’s okay. But after a break like that, you get treatment, right away. Or you get someone to heal it for you with the Force.’</p><p>‘I couldn’t leave,’ Ben says flatly. He doesn’t really feel like fighting. ‘I was in a Force hold. The whole point was to overcome the pain of it.’</p><p>‘Ah,’ Luke says. ‘For how long were you in a Force hold with a broken wrist?’</p><p>‘Two days. Give or take. Until I could learn to work around it and use it without experiencing pain.’</p><p>Luke seems, insubstantial as he is, to be gritting his teeth.</p><p>‘And that’s normal, is it? You’d train Rey that way?’</p><p>‘Well, it worked. I survived a hit from the bowcaster that would have killed anyone else. It helped me to overcome pain.’</p><p>‘And the burnt skin?’</p><p>‘It was nothing. I told you. I made noise.’</p><p>‘But it was still broken,’ Luke says. ‘What, six years later?’</p><p>‘It was a reminder of my ability to overcome pain.’</p><p>‘Oh kid,’ Luke says, softly. ‘It wasn’t. It really wasn’t. It was just a broken wrist that nobody fixed for you.’</p><p><br/>+</p><p> </p><p>He lets someone go. Some stupid Resistance boot-licker, a young guy – maybe 20 or even younger than that. He’s been fucking around graffitiing First Order signs. Petty, trivial stuff. Ben only comes across him because he’s on a planet where he’s landed to observe the battle. It’s happenstance.</p><p>Still, they bring him to him, as they do with all prisoners. The kid’s scared. Pretty rough deal for him, Ben guesses. Normally he’d have been sent to a labour planet or what have you by some minor officer. Bad luck for him that the unstable all-powerful boss was in town.</p><p>‘Leave us,’ Ben says, as the kid’s standing right by him. The guards dissipate. They’re not going to argue.</p><p>He can read his emotions well enough. Fear. A desperate last hope that things might, somehow, not go the way they must. People always feel that before they die. It’s an interesting phenomenon. They always think that the day might be saved.</p><p>He takes off his mask. It’s heavy, and the kid’s going to die anyway, so who cares. The hissing noise startles him, and then he looks Ben right in the eye.</p><p>‘Don’t,’ he says, in accented Basic.</p><p>‘I can’t let you leave.’</p><p>The guy’s eyes flicker. ‘Why not? What’s it to you if I live?’</p><p>‘An inconvenience.’</p><p>This is already more conversation than the situation merits. Ben’s uncomfortably aware of Luke, a silent presence, a sort of radiating, vague light.</p><p>He hears his uncle’s voice, very distinct.</p><p>‘Are you fucking serious?’ Luke says. ‘You don’t even know this kid.’</p><p>Is he fucking serious? Maybe, but not enough.</p><p>‘Ben, do not do this,’ Luke says, very clearly. ‘It’s not you. It makes you feel bad.’</p><p>‘I don’t feel anything.’</p><p>The boy stares, because to him it looks like Kylo Ren is talking to the air. He can’t see Luke.</p><p>‘You feel things,’ Luke says, and he’s so strong. ‘Right now you feel that it’s a bad idea to kill this kid for no reason. That is a very clear, inescapable feeling that you have about this situation.’</p><p>‘It’s not that simple.’</p><p>‘This is fucking mess,’ Luke says, and Ben finds he can agree easily enough with that. The kid’s shaking now, but he isn’t attempting to run, despite the fact that Kylo Ren’s obviously having some kind of psychotic break. He’s just cowering.</p><p>‘Don’t,’ he says.</p><p>‘Ben, you shouldn’t do things that you don’t want to do,’ Luke tells him. ‘Forget about all the bullshit. You don’t want to hurt this kid. So don’t. Make it that simple.’</p><p>There’s an argument there he can appreciate.</p><p>He turns to the boy, the young man.</p><p>‘Go,’ he says, indifferently. He moves a step towards him. Touches him, his hand on his shoulder. Their minds overlap, for the briefest moment. Ben can see who he is. Scared, young, silly. Nothing to even think about. He’ll grow up to be another person anyway.</p><p>He shows him the way out, the one that won’t be guarded. The idea can be implanted in his mind in a heartbeat.</p><p>And then, he turns back the other way, towards the generals. Doesn’t look back, just keeps walking. Puts his mask on.</p><p>+</p><p> </p><p>They train that evening, Ben opening the routine as he always does. The Force seems particularly easy to handle today. He feels in control and calm.</p><p>‘So,’ Luke says. ‘Not killing people.’</p><p>Ben just shrugs.</p><p>‘It didn’t feel right. He was just some kid.’</p><p>‘They’re always just some kid,’ Luke says, but he doesn’t elaborate and he doesn’t really need to.</p><p>+</p><p> </p><p>They keep going, and his whole life seems to be split into two entirely disconnected parts. There’s the part where he has a job to do that involves exterminating people, and there’s the part where he isn’t.</p><p>They train, he and Luke, and then he and Rey. Sometimes with Luke, he just meditates. Thoughts swirl in and out. He floats, the way that you do. Luke floats as well, although he’s only half there. Ben idles around in it, in control. He used to do this all the time.</p><p>At some point, he thinks about the Light, which is unusual, but what isn’t these days. It occurs to him that it’s fine to think about it. It’s not a thought crime. So he directs his mind that way, and lets it unfurl outwards. <br/><br/>He thinks about the way Luke was when his wrist was broken. He was with him, although at that point, he must have hated him. Ben was his enemy, which is strange. He was still kind. He didn’t look like he hated him at all.</p><p>His eyes are open, and he looks around the room. All at once, he grasps it. The thing he’s been missing. He sees around him, eyes wide open. The Force brings everything into balance. There’s a shimmer over things, the colour of intention, memory. Light, dark. He looks at it all, and it’s overwhelmingly bright and complicated.</p><p>‘Shit,’ he says, almost losing it. He nearly falls, which is just embarrassing. Luke just smiles.</p><p> ‘Pretty great, right? Assuming you’re seeing what I see.’</p><p>He looks at his uncle and he is, for the first time, <em>actually there</em>. Luke has a body. He is a physical form. Lines on his face. A smile. Hair. Ben can actually see him, the real him. He moves over towards him, puzzled by it, disbelieving. Reaches out with his hand. Touches his uncle’s shoulder.</p><p>There is a physical sensation of touch.</p><p>‘Oh,’ he says. ‘You’re more real.‘</p><p>Luke’s still smiling.</p><p>‘Yeah, I guess it would seem that way.’ He reaches out his own hand, and just lightly, touches Ben’s hand with his own. It’s so weird to see him again, as he was, or is, or might be. Ben’s not sure if he’s only better at imagining things, or if he’s really there. It doesn’t matter.</p><p>‘Shame you forgot,’ how to do this, Luke says, sounding amused. ‘You look like a new kid in training. All wide-eyed and pure.’</p><p>Ben raises his eyebrows.</p><p>‘Well, maybe not,’ Luke laughs. ‘Wide-eyed, anyway.’</p><p>He looks around, keeping the Force and his physicality in perfect balance. The world like this is so incredibly beautiful. Shifting, timeless, bound by time. It’s worth his whole life to be able to see things like this again.</p><p>‘I didn’t forget,’ he tells Luke. ‘I dreamed about it all the time.’</p><p>‘But you stopped trying.’</p><p> ‘I didn’t like seeing the things I saw.’</p><p>‘I suppose there’s no point asking why you didn’t like them?’</p><p>‘Don’t,’ he says. Abruptly, jarringly, he loses the focus. The material world blinks back in, solid and present. The vision is gone.</p><p>He looks at Luke’s spectral form.</p><p>‘Just don’t,’ he says.</p><p>Luke just looks at him. Doesn’t say anything but seems to invite further comment.</p><p>‘I don’t want to discuss it.’</p><p>‘Yeah,’ Luke says. ‘That I get. But at some point you know, I think we might have to.’</p><p>‘What is it that you expect me to say? That I’m, what, sorry? I have no regrets. I feel no sorrow.’</p><p>‘But you couldn’t bear to see yourself. You’d rather never shut your eyes, never see anything, than look at yourself.’</p><p>‘I can bear it,’ he says, and he’s starting to feel that rising anger, frustration, rage. ‘I can bear it fine.’</p><p>Luke doesn’t answer that at all.</p><p>+</p><p> </p><p>A few days later, he wakes up from another nightmare. It’s always the same one. It’s always Snoke, in his head, telling him to do things that he can’t stop doing.</p><p>He wakes up and Luke’s there, again. He doesn’t panic as much now. It’s easier to let the thoughts go.</p><p>But this time, as he breathes in and out, lets it pass, Luke does talk about it.</p><p> ‘You have dreams that bad a lot?’ he asks.</p><p>‘Sometimes.’</p><p>‘What do you normally do about them?’</p><p>‘Nothing. Wait until morning.’</p><p>‘Alone?’</p><p>‘How else?’</p><p>‘Ben…’ Luke’s voice is soft. ‘You can’t seriously plan to live like this indefinitely.’</p><p>‘I’m fine.’</p><p>‘You’re not fine. You’re waking up in blind panic, screaming in the middle of the night, about the man you say dropped you from heights, burnt your skin, cut you open. All of which you say didn’t bother you at all.’</p><p>‘It didn’t.’</p><p>‘Yes, it did.’</p><p>‘How would you know?’</p><p>‘I know you,’ Luke says simply.</p><p>‘You knew Ben Solo.’</p><p>‘Also. But I know you, too. Whoever you are. I’ve been trailing you around here for weeks now. Months. I don’t think you’re fine.’</p><p> ‘Is this going to turn into the big talk? Where you tell me to come back to the Light, leave all this behind?’</p><p>‘No,’ Luke says, simply. ‘You’ve chosen what you’ve chosen. I just want you to know that good teachers don’t drop their students from heights. Or burn them, or torture them. They don’t leave them with a broken wrist that never heals. They don’t let them perform stupid and dangerous tricks that can get them killed. They don’t make them wake up in the night in terror. That’s all. I just want you to know, because I’m not sure you do.’</p><p>Ben thinks about this. Grudgingly, there’s something he can say. It’s not the thing Luke wants, but –</p><p>‘I had to use a lot of power to control the pain,’ he says, although it doesn’t follow on and he knows that. ‘I’ve been thinking about that.’</p><p>Luke waits.</p><p>‘It was hard to meditate,’ he adds. ‘I mean, in the way that – that you taught me. That I was taught as a student.’</p><p>‘I saw that. You didn’t seem to have much focus.’</p><p>‘Because of that,’ Ben goes on, hesitantly, tired, ‘I couldn’t always seem to get my thoughts under control. I don’t know. It felt more difficult. I feel better now.’</p><p>‘I’ll bet.’ Luke’s tone softens, just a fraction. ‘I wish you’d had it healed sooner.’</p><p>‘Snoke couldn’t Force heal. I don’t mean he didn’t want to, although maybe that was true too. He just didn’t have the knowledge.’</p><p>‘Ah.’</p><p>‘I don’t think he knew as much about the Force as –‘ Ben breaks off. ‘As he said.’</p><p>‘Seems kind of unlikely to me.’ Luke shrugs. ‘He was a fraud, Ben. Don’t get exercised about it, but that’s my opinion.’</p><p>‘It is also mine,’ Ben says, very carefully. He feels like that’s a step into a new place, somewhere uncertain. Terrifying. ‘I think he – needed my power. To do things, I mean. He didn’t have enough of his own.’</p><p>‘Right.’</p><p>‘And, you know, he taught me stuff.’ He shrugs. ‘The stuff you didn’t know. Dark Sider stuff. But in the end, it wasn’t really different.’ He sits up, rubs his eyes with his hands. ‘Learning how to lift a rock isn’t different to learning how to throw a saber at someone’s eye.’</p><p>‘Technically, anyway,’ Luke says. ‘I guess morally you could say it’s different.’</p><p>‘Yeah, sure. But technically, it’s the same … skill. So I figured that out quite quickly, that a lot of the things here were the same, only with a different purpose.’</p><p>‘You must have been bored.’ Luke’s floating, and in the darkness he’s barely visible at all. ‘Since you could already lift rocks.’</p><p>‘I was bored all the time. But he did teach me about pain, which wasn’t a – good thing. Maybe. From your perspective. But he taught me how to suffer and that was necessary so I could make other people suffer too.’</p><p>Luke sighs.</p><p>‘That wasn’t necessary, Ben. Making other people suffer wasn’t necessary. Suffering yourself wasn’t necessary.’</p><p>‘Maybe not, but I learned it anyway.’</p><p>‘And now you have nightmares.’</p><p>‘I deserve them.’</p><p>There’s a pause.</p><p>‘Kriff’s sake,’ Luke says, which isn’t exactly expected. ‘I wish you’d not been so good at blocking me out when I was alive and I could have actually done something.’</p><p>‘About what?’</p><p>‘Your guilt.’ His uncle’s voice is masked. ‘The way you think about all this.’</p><p>‘I feel no guilt.’</p><p>‘Stop.’ Luke takes a breath. ‘Stop doing that. You feel guilt. You have all the full range of human feelings. You’re a person. It is impossible for you to progress with your training if you can’t accept that.’</p><p>‘I’m fully trained.’</p><p>‘And now you’re training someone else. Which in itself is training. You can’t bullshit that you have no personal experiences, Ben. It doesn’t work.’</p><p>‘Maybe.’</p><p>‘Not maybe.’ Luke smiles. ‘Grow up, Ben,’ he tells him, just gently. ‘Get over this weird thing that you’re not a person. Lying to yourself has nothing to do with being a -’ he breaks off. ‘Being the person you are becoming.’</p><p>Ben finds himself almost smiling.</p><p>‘I did actually attend temple, you know,’ he tells him. ‘I know the word you’re not using.’</p><p>‘Get some sleep, kid,’ Luke says. ‘No more nightmares. The guy’s dead. You killed him.’</p><p>He does sleep, and there are no more nightmares.</p><p>+</p><p> </p><p>The graves actually make him quite queasy. They always have, but he’s just not noticed that much before. Now he’s starting to see things better, it’s increasingly difficult to not sense them, to not react to them.</p><p>He doesn’t really like mass graves. Clearly Luke doesn’t either, because whenever they pass, his form seems to flicker to a sallow sort of colour and he goes very quiet.</p><p>They never talk about it, but he starts avoiding going that way.</p><p><br/>+</p><p> </p><p>‘I’ve been thinking about what we learned at temple,’ he says to Luke, which is not a topic he’s ever broached before.</p><p>‘Uh huh?’</p><p>‘You know, when I’m training Rey, I’m trying to follow some of what I learned there. Teach her the … practical stuff.’</p><p>‘Practical, right.’</p><p>He takes a breath.</p><p>‘But it’s not only practical, is it?’</p><p>There’s a sharp pause.</p><p>‘I’d say not, no.’</p><p>‘It’s more… the other stuff. That, I don’t know how to teach her. Or I can’t.’</p><p>Luke flickers, very bright.</p><p>‘You probably can, Ben.’</p><p>‘It’s not easy.’</p><p>‘You know everything that she needs to know,’ his uncle tells him. ‘Every single thing. You are the person she needs you to be, or else the Force wouldn’t have brought you together.’</p><p>‘I don’t understand it.’ He risks it. ‘I’m teaching her how to be a – ‘</p><p>Luke waits, looking at him. His expression is both knowing and teasing. He raises an eyebrow, expectant.</p><p>Jedi, okay.’ Ben pauses. ‘In effect, you could see it that I’m teaching Rey to be a Jedi.’</p><p>‘Yes.’</p><p>‘Which sort of requires me to be one, and which – yeah. Well. Which I’m clearly not.’</p><p>‘Are you not?’ Luke’s tone doesn’t vary.</p><p>‘I’m a murderer,’ Ben says, calmly. ‘I work for the Sith. I’m their descendant. Their power runs through me. That’s how this is.’</p><p>Luke just raises an eyebrow.</p><p>‘So if that’s true, you can’t train Rey.’</p><p>‘It’s not that simple.’</p><p>‘I guess not.’ Luke’s standing very still, nearly rigid, which almost makes Ben smile.</p><p> ‘I’m done with running my saber through you when I can’t cope with this stuff. Relax.’</p><p>‘What’s your point then?’</p><p>‘Yeah, well.’ He takes a breath. ‘Let’s say I help Rey anyway. I train her to be a – ‘</p><p>‘Jedi,’ Luke says again, impatiently. ‘Can you really not say the word or what?’</p><p>‘I can say it. I train Rey to be a Jedi. And to do that, I remember all the things I learned with you. From before. And I start to do all those things again, start to follow all those Jedi practises, which means not killing people, not using the Dark Side -’</p><p>Luke looks at him, still waiting.</p><p>‘That’s what I’m actually doing,’ Ben says, taking a breath. ‘I’m pretty much doing some of that now.’</p><p>‘I’d noticed that.’<br/><br/>‘But where’s the balance in that? There’s no one on the other side now.’</p><p>‘Someone’ll come,’ Luke says. ‘There’ll always be something or someone. That’s the Force.’</p><p>‘Yes, but –‘ he breaks. ‘What if the something is <em>worse than me</em>?’</p><p>Luke stares at him. Ben can really see his eyes, as if he’s physically present in the room. There’s a long pause, as Luke looks at him.</p><p>‘Are you fucking kidding me?’ he asks, finally, and Ben recoils.</p><p>‘Sorry?’</p><p>‘Ben, if you tell me that the reason you’re here, the reason you haven’t just left yet, is to prevent something worse coming along, I’ll run <em>myself</em> through with a saber.’</p><p>‘That’s not it. I’ve chosen this path.’</p><p>Something snaps in Luke. He can almost see it, and he can certainly sense it. There’s a break.</p><p>‘Enough,’ he says, and his voice is strident, echoing. Ben thinks it might be in his head, but it doesn’t sound like it is. ‘I can’t do this anymore, kid.’</p><p>‘Do what?’</p><p>‘Watch this,’ Luke says. ‘Listen to it. Put up with it. I don’t fucking know what. Ben, <em>you hate your life here</em>. You are living in a terrible, wrong way and you know that. Does it not bother you?’</p><p>‘I’m not returning to the Light.’</p><p>His uncle just raises his eyebrows.</p><p>‘Why not?’</p><p>He can’t answer that, which he supposes is its own answer. Luke waits, but when he sees nothing is forthcoming, he just sighs.</p><p>‘Ben,’ he says, ‘You already have. All of this is you not being a Sith. You sit with Rey, holding her hands, and you tell her the things you were taught. You show her how to be a Jedi, just like you were shown. You couldn’t do that if you were on the Dark Side. You do get that? At some level you understand it?’</p><p>‘Yes.’</p><p>‘You’re not a Sith,’ Luke says again. ‘God knows if you ever were. You’ve done terrible things, but you are basically not good at being this made-up Kylo Ren person.’</p><p>‘You see only the good things.’</p><p>‘No I don’t.’ Luke sounds angrier now. ‘I see that you have murdered people I love. You have done things that make me ashamed and sick and sad. It is repellent to me, what you have done. But I also see now, although I didn’t when I was alive, that in some way, you are more than that. You are still my nephew.’</p><p> ‘And as for what you’re supposed to do about Rey,’ Luke adds, sounding suddenly furious, ‘well, you know. You’ve known from the first second you met her that you have to train her in the way you were trained.’</p><p>With which he fades out, leaving Ben very much alone.</p><p><br/>+</p><p> </p><p>They don’t talk for a few days after that. Luke’s there, of course, but he sort of fades back into an amorphous form, a formless mass. Ben tries not to think about it too much. He doesn’t speak to Rey either, or can’t access her anyway.</p><p> He just works. The usual things. Delegations. Politics. Strategy meetings that seem to go nowhere at all. Long journeys to distant planets, hunting for people to kill. In the abstract, he can still make decisions to kill people. In the concrete, when it’s his hands, his saber, he finds it more complicated now.</p><p>In fact, he doesn’t kill anyone. As a general rule, he sort of lets them go. He hurts them, to the limit of what they can take. Renders them unconscious. Scars them. Whatever it takes that isn’t actually wiping their life out. Sometimes, increasingly, he doesn’t even bother with that.</p><p>The lightness in him blazes. It’s good that Snoke’s dead. If he were alive, he’d have Ben down on the ground kissing the dust, so obvious is it that he’s not Kylo Ren. Hux and the others can be fooled. Rey can’t. Luke can’t. And he supposes, if he were to ever see her again, Leia wouldn’t be fooled either. Anyone who can sense through the Force, including him, can see what it is now obvious.</p><p>Everything is a mess. Above all else, the graves. Where he is a desolate place. Even without Luke’s help, he senses with his eyes open these days. He can feel them calling. Dead Jedi, dead friends. Dead people. He can see their memories. Touch them, taste them.  </p><p>At some point, he can’t take it anymore. Avoidance isn’t working. He goes there, Luke’s presence trailing him because what else would happen but that, although they’re still not speaking to each other. It’s very late at night, and no one’s there.</p><p>The place is obscene. It is like being in the middle of a pool of blood, swimming in the stuff. The Force is charred and painful, all the lingering memories of the lives he cut short. He really doesn’t like it at all. He can sense everything. He tries to sense more, stepping into the Force, not holding anything back. It’s black and entrapping and slimy, everywhere over him. Coating him.</p><p> He can feel the way it was to kill them, their blood on his hands. There wasn’t any blood in real life, but there’s blood here. They’re there, in some way. Not alive and not like Luke, but not entirely gone.</p><p>He feels sick, sick enough to vomit. This purging makes no difference, but it does at least bring him to material reality – which is him, alone on a dead planet’s surface, under which the people he’s killed are interred in dirt, breathing heavily, the stars above as bright as knives.</p><p>He manages to breathe more evenly, focusing on his breath. In and out, the steadiness of it. He senses the earth beneath him. The sky above. His uncle, who is unmistakably there in some way or another.</p><p>‘Luke?’ he asks. ‘Are you really there?’</p><p>He steps forward, a little more substantial but not very. A ghost, the light of the stars shining through him. He’s a glint in the corner of Ben’s eye, a reflection that vanishes. Nothing more than that.</p><p>‘I’m here.’</p><p>Ben holds onto his voice.</p><p>‘I don’t like it,’ he tells him, finally. ‘What I did here. It wasn’t the right thing.’</p><p>‘I know that, kid.’ Luke’s more present now.</p><p> ‘Are they all here?’ he asks. His tone is fractured. ‘Did you kill them all, or did other people help?’</p><p>‘Mostly me,’ Ben says. He feels ….</p><p>Something.</p><p>‘It wasn’t true that I couldn’t sense it,’ he says. He feels slightly sick. ‘I sense it all the time.’</p><p>Luke just looks at him.</p><p>‘It bothers me,’ he adds. ‘It really…’</p><p>‘Ben,’ Luke says, patient. ‘You’ve got to grieve for them. It’s how you make it better. You have to be sorry. It’s not enough to just sense it. You have to do something about the way it makes you feel.’</p><p>‘I don’t know how.’</p><p>‘Sure you do,’ Luke says. ‘What do you think you need to do?</p><p>‘Think about them?’</p><p>‘And?’</p><p>‘I don’t know.’</p><p>He’s aware that his breathing is rapid. He hopes he isn’t going to hyperventilate again, not here, not like this.</p><p>‘All right. Just try that then,’ his uncle says. ‘I’ll be with you.’</p><p>‘Don’t you hate me?’ Ben says. ‘Why don’t you hate me?’</p><p>Luke only shakes his head. ‘I’m sad about what you did. Angry, too. I’m sad about what’s been done to you and how you got here. I don’t hate you.’</p><p>‘I’m a monster,’ he says. ‘I killed all these people.’</p><p>‘I love you kid,’ Luke says. He sounds suddenly choked. ‘You’ve spent years here, like this. I thought you were dead, but all this time … Of course I don’t hate you.’</p><p>‘I did this,’ he says. He indicates, vaguely to the graves. ‘I did so many things…’</p><p>Luke doesn’t say anything.</p><p>‘I’m sorry,’ Ben says.</p><p>Nothing changes. The force doesn’t magically heal anything. There’s still a void in the centre of everything.</p><p>It’s just, only, that he can breathe a little easier. It feels a little bit less terrible. He and Luke just stand there, side by side.</p><p>‘I’m sorry,’ he says again.</p><p> </p><p>+</p><p>He and Rey talk all the time. He trains her exactly as he was trained. Every movement. Every way of using the Force. He explains it all, and as he does, he can feel the Light, suffusing him and her. It’s dizzying, after so long without it.</p><p>‘You don’t seem at all the same,’ she says, one night. Her tone is curious. ‘I mean, the same as when I last saw you in person. Months ago now.’</p><p>Since he’s currently glowing with Jedi-ness, he’d have to agree with her on that point. He’s even started dreaming about things he learned at temple. Old faces talk to him. Former masters. They seem generally benign, despite the fact he’s nominally leading an organisation of murderers these days. They treat him like a person. He has the feeling of being welcomed home.</p><p>‘How do you mean?’ he asks.</p><p>‘Well, you don’t –‘ She shakes he head. ‘Hard to explain. You still don’t smile. You still seem sad. But the things you’re teaching me aren’t from the Dark Side, are they? That’s not how they feel.’</p><p>‘They’re just the things I learned.’ He thinks about it. ‘Do I not smile?’</p><p>‘No, not at all.’</p><p>‘I never thought about it.’</p><p>‘And there’s this,’ she says, gesturing awkwardly. ‘The way you talk to me.’</p><p>‘How’s that?’</p><p>‘Friendly,’ she says, sounding puzzled. ‘Especially over the last month or so. And I know this is a dream, I try not to read too much into it, but you didn’t seem friendly before, not in this way.’</p><p>‘You think it might be a trick?’</p><p>‘I don’t know what to think. But I like the things you teach me. I like being with you so much.’</p><p>‘I like it too.’</p><p>And then he does try to smile, for the first time in a long time, apparently. Curious how it works. She watches, eyes sparkling with amusement.</p><p>‘Oh,’ she says. She smiles back. ‘You look nice like that. I wondered what you’d look like.’</p><p>She holds out her hands, and he takes them. They touch a lot. It is in the majority for training purposes, but sometimes not. Sometimes it’s just this.</p><p>‘What’s really going on with you?’ she asks.</p><p>‘Just… things,’ he says, indistinctly. ‘You?’</p><p>‘Things.’ She laughs. Moves closer to him.</p><p>He’s still holding her hands.</p><p>‘You didn’t destroy the base on Trana,’ she says, almost cautiously. ‘I was there, about a day after you’d been. You were kind of sloppy.’</p><p>‘I cut the power supply. That was the goal, to prevent messages being relayed.’</p><p>‘You could have burned the whole thing down.’ She shakes her head. ‘Or killed them, not just stunned them. It’s easy for you to kill people, right?’</p><p>He takes a breath.</p><p>‘Not that much, actually. Increasingly not.’</p><p>‘Oh.’<br/><br/>She lets go of one of his hands, and brings her own hand to his face. She strokes his cheek, her fingers lingering on his skin.</p><p>‘Ben,’ she says, and it’s not really a question but he answers it anyway.</p><p>‘Something like that.’</p><p>She puts her arms around him then, and he can feel the weight of her body, her breath on his skin. Her hair. He puts his own arm around her, holding her close to him. She kisses his neck, a soft, butterfly kiss. He can feel her happiness, a rising, delicate thing.<br/><br/>There is no way, he thinks, that this is the standard practice of training a new Jedi. There’s some stuff he’s been completely missing here.</p><p>+</p><p> </p><p>‘Rey’s going to be a great Jedi,’ he tells Luke.</p><p>They’re fighting, barely. Ben doesn’t really need the practice with his saber, but he likes it anyway, to relax if you could call it that. Luke has a saber, an insubstantial one, but he mostly fights the droids. He can only fight Luke if he’s sensing with the Force and can see his uncle clearly, as he can now.</p><p>‘Don’t doubt it.’ Luke parries. ‘What are you teaching her?’</p><p>He tells him, and Luke laughs.</p><p>‘You skipped that class, kid.’</p><p>‘Yeah. But I revised it later.’</p><p>‘Did you? When?’</p><p>He shrugs, slightly embarrassed. ‘When I was – here. On the base with Snoke. Not right away when I got here, but maybe six months later. Something like that.’</p><p>Luke puts his saber down.</p><p>‘What?’</p><p>‘I went to the library on Moshana. Took a shuttle. I wanted to know what I’d missed.’</p><p>‘Was that not difficult?’ Luke asks. ‘Since that was a sacred place and you were full on Kylo Ren at that point.’</p><p>‘Well, not – not really.’ Ben goes for it. ‘I dressed down. Cloak and stuff. And I tried to not be so…’ He gestures around. ‘So all this.’</p><p>‘I don’t really get that.’ Luke sounds puzzled. ‘I couldn’t sense anything. And I was looking, Ben. At that time, I was really looking.’</p><p>‘I blocked you.’ He shrugs again. ‘Snoke taught me that. So, it wasn’t that hard. Or well, maybe it was, but I could do it.’</p><p>‘So you went to Moshana, in some ragged cloak,’ Luke surmises. ‘To read up on Jedi teachings.’</p><p>‘I stayed a while,’ Ben says, aware that he sounds quite guilty. ‘A couple of weeks, I guess. It was a lot like your temple, so the routine was easy to adapt to. I could finish some of the work there.’</p><p>There’s a pause before Luke, improbably, starts laughing. He really laughs, like this is the most amusing thing he’s heard in years.</p><p>‘What’s funny about that?’</p><p>Luke snorts. ‘Ben –‘ He laughs again, before suppressing it. ‘Nothing is funny. It’s a tragic situation, kid. It’s sad and upsetting and I don’t know what to feel. You went back to temple!’</p><p>‘I – yeah.’ Ben shrugs. ‘I missed it, Luke. Obviously I couldn’t go back to you. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t ever want to. You – get that?’</p><p> ‘I get that <em>now</em>,’ Luke says. ‘But Ben, you could have come back to us. Did you not realise that? What do you imagine would have happened if you did?’</p><p>He sighs.</p><p>‘Yeah, I don’t know. You and I would have fought to the death. Probably mine. You wanted to kill me, and then I killed your students. Ruined your life. I assumed it would have been mostly fighting. Maybe you’d have had me interred in some prison for the rest of my life. Or worse, you’d have slammed the door in my face and not done anything. Maybe I thought that was more likely, I don’t know.’</p><p>‘I wouldn’t have done any of those things.’ Luke reaches out to him, insubstantial. Puts an arm on his shoulder, just for a moment. ‘That is incredibly wrong, Ben. I might have fought you, if I’d thought you were going to try to kill me or someone else. I would have been angry. Upset, and confused. But if you showed up saying you wanted to continue your training and you were leaving the other stuff behind, you know what I would have done?’</p><p>He shakes his head.</p><p>‘I would have forgiven you eventually,’ Luke says gently. He sounds a bit choked. ‘I would have loved you, the way that Han and Leia loved you. I would have taken time to trust you, but I would have been really fucking happy, Ben. Because you left a – hole in our life. You understand that?’</p><p>‘Yes. But –‘</p><p>‘There’s no but.’ Luke sounds much too sad. ‘You don’t slam the door on the people you love. Least of all if they’ve been tortured. Had you broken your wrist then already? Your shoulder?’</p><p>‘Both, I think. I thought maybe at the library I’d learn how to handle the pain better, actually. It was a bit… intense for the first year.’</p><p>‘Intense,’ Luke repeats. ‘I’ll bet. Did they have any advice for you? Who ran that place? Estran?’</p><p>‘Yeah. He didn’t have much advice. Meditate. Suffer horribly.’ Ben sighs. ‘Come to understand the beauty of pain. A dark gift. All that stuff.’</p><p>‘That guy was such an asshole. Why didn’t he just Force heal it for you and send you on your way?’</p><p>‘Didn’t want to waste his precious lifeforce on me, I guess. He didn’t think I was important enough.’ Ben shrugs. ‘He might have done, if I’d thrown my real name around. But in the circumstances…’</p><p> ‘I wish you’d asked me,’ Luke says, very quietly. ‘I would have wasted mine.’</p><p>‘That would have been an awkward conversation,’ Ben says. He smiles, which he does sometimes with Rey now but very seldom with Luke. ‘Hi uncle, sorry about everything and by the way would you fix my shoulder which the guy I left you all for smashed to pieces.’ He laughs. ‘And also my wrist, and yeah, by the way I can’t sense with the Force anymore so have you got a solution for that too.’</p><p>Luke smiles.</p><p>‘It would have been a weird evening, that’s for sure.’</p><p> ‘And I know,’ Ben adds, ‘that you would have told me to leave Snoke behind because he as a murderer and he was using me for my power, and he was abusive. And that you wouldn’t have liked all that stuff he did to me. I know you would have hated all that, Luke. Even though you were angry with me and what I was doing wasn’t good enough and I had seriously let you down. You would have still helped me anyway.’</p><p>‘You got it.’</p><p> ‘See, uncle?’ he says, only slightly teasing. ‘It only took another seven years for me to figure out what being a Jedi is.’</p><p>Luke laughs.</p><p>‘Is that what you’ve figured out then.’</p><p>Ben just smiles.</p><p> <br/> </p><p>+</p><p> </p><p>‘I want to see you,’ Rey tells him, and her eyes are shining. ‘Not just in dreams. I want to really see you.’</p><p>‘Yes.’</p><p>They’re both floating, in the way that Jedi do. Ben’s anchored to her, and she to him. Nothing bad can happen to them like this. Light suffuses them both. He doesn’t even bother to pretend to be Kylo Ren. He can’t, and she knows that he can’t.</p><p>‘Come find me,’ she says. ‘Come to where I am. I want this to be real.’</p><p>‘It’s real now.’</p><p>‘You’ve got to leave the base. You shouldn’t be there. We need you with us.’</p><p>‘I’m not ready.’</p><p>‘Yes you are.’ Her eyes are closed. She’s totally relaxed. ‘Of course you are.’</p><p>‘When I leave,’ he says, voicing this to her for the first time, ‘You get that it’ll … trigger events. There’ll be a new bad guy.’</p><p>‘Sure.’</p><p>‘If I stay like this, it maintains something. Some degree of darkness.’</p><p>‘Not much though,’ Rey says. Her eyes are open now, and she’s looking at him, soft and relaxed. ‘You don’t seem to be pulling your weight as far as darkness goes.’</p><p>‘Not much,’ he agrees. ‘But I represent it, and representing it is still something. If I leave and join the Resistance with you, if we both act as Jedis, something bad is going to happen.’</p><p>‘Maybe I’ll turn,’ she says, joking. ‘We can switch places.’</p><p>He shudders, involuntary, at the thought.</p><p>‘Kidding.’</p><p>‘Don’t.’</p><p>‘Ben, I get it,’ she tells him, smiling. ‘But whatever the thing is that replaces you, whatever happens next, we’re going to be facing it together. Isn’t that what really matters?’</p><p><br/>+</p><p> </p><p>‘I’m leaving,’ he tells Luke, not long after that. His uncle nods.</p><p>‘I know. It seems like the right time, doesn’t it?’</p><p>‘I thought I’d release the prisoners. Before I go.’ Ben’s already putting on his cloak; he’s already prepared all that he needs to do, which in the end isn’t all that much really. ‘Get them onto a shuttle.’</p><p>‘Yes.’</p><p> He looks at Luke directly then, taking him in. Older, wider. Sardonic, kind, complicated. All the things that made his uncle who he was. For a while now, Ben’s had an idea about all of this. He isn’t sure if it’s own mind or the Force that’s led him to it, but there’s no difference anyway, not really, as to how it comes to be that he sometimes knows things.</p><p>‘You won’t be able to come, will you?’</p><p>Luke smiles, a little sad.</p><p>‘No, Ben. I won’t be able to come.’</p><p>‘Were you ever really here?’</p><p>‘What do you think?’</p><p>‘I don’t know.’ He shrugs. ‘It doesn’t matter. You were here <em>to me</em>. For me.’</p><p>‘I was.’</p><p>There’s only one thing worth saying now. He’ll never see him again, he knows, not in this life anyway. In another life, perhaps, but even he doesn’t know too much about that.</p><p>‘Thank you.’</p><p>Luke reaches out; puts his hand on Ben’s shoulder, then around his shoulders, in something that might be a hug.</p><p>‘I wanted this for you, kid. I wanted it every day since the moment you left. You know that. I just wanted you to come home.’</p><p>He half-smiles. ‘Well, I guess that’s what I’m doing. I’ll miss you, Luke. Even if you weren’t really here.’</p><p>‘I was really here.’ His uncle’s form, incorporeal, shadowed, already seems to be fading, even as he says the words. ‘Don’t be an idiot. You know when things are real and when they’re not.’</p><p>‘Yes.’</p><p>‘It’s gonna be fine,’ Luke tells him, half gone now. His voice sounds like it’s very far away. ‘Totally fine. You can handle it.’</p><p> Ben isn’t entirely sure about that, but he supposes it’s a perspective that’s worth considering, at least. It’s something. So he nods, and he says yes, but even as he’s saying it, he knows that Luke’s gone.</p><p>Around him, there’s nothing except the base, a ship hovering over a dead planet, over the graves that he made; that he hates and despairs. For the first time in months, there’s no shimmering, vague presence. No ghost. There’s no light now in the room except his own, which is enough. Which has to be enough.</p><p>Rey’s waiting, he knows. He can sense her. They haven’t formally discussed a meeting point, but Ben finds that a trivial consideration, given that they can meet each other anywhere, any time. Wherever he ends up, she’ll end up there too, sooner or later. That’s the Force. That’s this life that they have together.</p><p>He moves quietly. There’s nothing he can’t face here, because there is no enemy or situation that is strong enough to distract him from what he has to do. Later, he’ll ditch the first ship he takes, depositing the prisoners somewhere suitable. He’ll have to commandeer another ship, somehow. Become untraceable.</p><p>One will turn up. It will, as Luke just told him, all be fine. As he walks towards the cells, already thinking of Rey, already thinking of the future, he smiles.</p><p>+</p>
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